After a certain point, the distinction between stupid and evil vanishes. "Young boys throw stones at frogs for sport. The frogs, however, die in earnest" is one good analogy. For the frogs, it doesn't matter whether the boys throwing the stones hate frogs or not.
So it is with conservatives. Take Jonah Goldberg. Is he stupid? Without a doubt. Only a man of towering stupidity could write a book titled "Liberal Fascism" and claim that Hitler's vegetarianism and the fact that the Nazi Party had "socialism" as part of its name proves that fascism is a liberal political movement.
Yet, from this magnum dopus has spring an entire new cottage industry of wingnuts waving Jonah's work around and calling every liberal thing fascism. Did you know that advocating for voting rights is fascism? Or believing that the police should not have the right to summarily execute citizens? And the only way to keep this fascism from taking hold of the country is to send in the military to massacre the protesters, or to have the FBI arrest those who would like to see every citizen vote.
Thus from Jonah's profoundly stupid book does profound evil grow. It perhaps started as a joke, but those using it now to bolster their arguments mean for real people to die in earnest.
In addition to evil/dumb, I add pandering to the ignorant and pathological. Then again, I am by training and disposition what you can call an infinite shades of gray guy.
As for modern conservative intellectual philosophy, well, there's none. It's just nihilistic desire for destruction.
Where do we put the looters, the vulture capitalists, the ones who know about the science but exploit and expand the ignorance because it's just so lucrative? I perceive them as nihilists, but a kind of nihilist that loves and enjoys the here-and-now while knowing full well it has a shelf-life of maybe ten or twenty years. (I think they are not nihilists, in other words. I need another word.)
I've mentioned to acquaintances that these people must either hate their kids and grandkids or be utterly indifferent to them, and I'm told, oh, their kids and grandkids will be just fine, there's money for generations. But I don't think they will be just fine; things are accelerating. So it's like a conscious attempt to imitate and exploit ignorance. That seems pathological. But maybe I am overestimating their ability to recognize a fact and I'm just dreaming that they know what they are doing (and what they are NOT doing) and persist anyway just to get some very fine years in (for them) before it collapses. Maybe they really believe that everything is going to be just fine, for them.
ETA: I guess the WIlhoit piece explains it, so thanks for that: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." I don't know about pathological or ignorant, but this is certainly traditional.
"the ones who know about the science but exploit and expand the ignorance because it's just so lucrative? I perceive them as nihilists, but"
A friend of mine who worked in the oil industry gave me an insight. A bunch of wells that were supposed to run dry in the 90s didn't -- because the engineers devised ways to get more oil out. So the wells produced a lot more, not because the dire predictive science was wrong about how much oil there was, but because the adaptive science solved that problem. So some of these vultures are, I figure, reckless idealists. There's a faith that the hugest problems really will all be solved at the last second by human genius -- just like always -- and in the meantime, if they sit on these problems, they live like kings.
"There's a faith that the hugest problems really will all be solved at the last second by human genius -- just like always..." Isn't it pretty to think so? But let's assume your theory about what the "vultures" believe is correct, which it may well be. Their faith in genius is motivating them, and their government enablers, to take a huge gamble -- and if they're wrong, all humanity pays the price. Yes, even the vultures themselves, unless they're lucky enough to either die like David Koch or flee into space with Elon Musk before things get *really* bad.
Oh, for sure! They're a nightmare. They're also the same people who are voting to cut research funding, which makes human genius much less likely to emerge, and they oppose immigration, which means if we do get miracle tech, it's more likely to appear in China. These bright-eyed idealists who make "genius" part of their battle plan are genuinely some of the dumbest people alive.
Exactly right; it was basically every Jerry Pournelle column from the Arab oil embargo for the next decade, except for simple hate-screeds against anyone too hippy/commie for his tastes. All I can add is that being who they are, these rampant individualists call it 'the genius of the Market', as if only the threat of poverty or the lure of wealth made people clever—perhaps many of them rarely know the extreme pleasure that finding a solution brings in itself..
Reminds me of this Federalist story where the guy said “Interstellar” showed global warming was no big deal because in that movie they fucked up the planet but American Ingenuity figured out how to fix it.
And, in fact, human ingenuity did not solve mankind's existential dilemma but, in fact, the unnamed alien deus ex machina that taught them where and how to go. Interstellar is, IMO, a beautiful story and certainly Matthew McConaughey's best film to date but it certainly did not demonstrate some sort of "get out of climate jail free" card for humans.
As a whole the conservative movement is nothing but an infinite continuum of stupid-evil; you can only assign numbers to individual cases. I'm 99% atheist, but it fascinates me now how the so-called issues have become biblical. We are discussing some serious right v. wrong, light v. dark, angelic v. satanic stuff.
I have repeatedly challenged my tiny social media audience to name their own "mankind's greater and lesser angels" ("you can even use the 7 deadly ones!") to discuss them in terms of today's politics, political parties, and politicians, and nobody ever bites.
Resolved: the conservative movement in this country has become the home of mankind's lesser angels.
Mostly “types” of stupid. 1.) Just plain stupid. 2.) Pretend stupid to blend in with stupid. 3.) Stupid to think they fooled Jesus. 4.) Stupid to think they are untouchable. Feel free to state your observed types.
I remember that first Voice column, Roy! And you haven’t lost your touch.
This is a very hard call for me to make because I think the evil is stupid – for example, conservatives/GOP can’t knowingly impoverish and kill their own supporters, and gin up white supremacy while refusing to broaden their appeal beyond their shrinking white base, and still continue to win elections or turn a profit; I also think the stupid is evil – all the mutating conspiracy theories on the Right from QAnon to 5G to anti-vaxxers/and anti-maskers all at the very least make people distrust their neighbors and at the worst lead to suffering and death.
So maybe I’d say 5/5 but I’d prefer to ignore the laws of mathematics and say it’s 100% of each.
They’re all evil, some more banal than others. On the bright side, polling today showed a whopping 67% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of race and the pandemic. Sure ~80% of Republicans still say he’s doing great but, banality of evil, meet the culmination of 50+ years of American pseudoconservatism.
I'm gonna say about sixty percent stupid, forty five percent evil. I know that doesn't add up to 100, but conservatives will be the first to whine at you about how hard they have to work compared to those lazy affirmative action hires. But, that's mostly because I'm watching Washington Journal, and Grover Norquist seems to think people who disagree with him should all be calling in on the democrat line and that CSPAN should be demanding to see their voter registration card before putting them on the air. Meanwhile, random caller on the independent line is demanding to know why democrats are even allowed since "the Constitution guarantees a republican form of government".
Evil parading as stupid, and it's deadly effective.
Case in point: DJT tweets some awful policy his Nazis are cooking up but misspells a word. Molly Jong-Fast, Rick Wilson, and Steve Schmidt (and others) spend the rest of the day tweeting about how stupid the president is. The misspelling trends all day long. Evil plan wins the day. In five fucking years the mainstream has utterly failed to learn to focus. It's all about "own" and "destroys" and all that tired bullshit.
Another case in point: QAnon. Massive sophisticated psy-op that has turned an alarming swath of the population into an anti-liberal democracy army by getting to believe things even though those things will kill them and the ones they love. All of the byzantine intricacies are certainly stupid, but it has utterly evil intent.
Sartre once said something pungent about how inanity was the point of anti-semitic discourse because it can't be argued with, disproven. They just exhaust you and seem to win. Every day Roy and any other publicly progressive figure gets this from whatever direction. Talib Kweli is a frequent target. WOC in my field bear its burden.
All I'm saying is that unless there's a massive effort to expose all the lies and machinations that made the conservation revolution possible by the ruling party -- an effort that won't happen in any conceivable timeline, since it would implicate Dems, Dem donors, major media corporations, and others, we'll have Viktor Carlson as the GOP contender in 2024 and he may well the fuck win.
Especially since in my lifetime I have only seen mainstream Dems shoot themselves in the foot every time they get power.
I think that you can only assume that the mainstream Dems "shoot themselves in the foot," if you think that they are not representing their real constituency.
Oh no, not at all. The DNC Dems definitely believe they represent their real intended constituency. And that is a part of the problem.
What I mean by "shoot themselves in the foot" (and I know the True-Blue will gnash their teeth over it) is that they soon find themselves lost and bewildered in mazes of bad-faith media coverage and RW "suggestions" that twist them into pretzels and cause all their intentions to fall apart. They try to out-Reagan the GOP. Try to out-war John Motherfucking Bolton (as seems to be a current now). Try to out-cop actual fascists. Plagiarize Republican plans for social safety nets instead of making an actual systemic change that protects every American. People get tired of them. Vote for Pubs in droves. Rinse and repeat. Then they can huddle safely as the minority party again and complain that they don't have any power. So I mean, sure, be offended by it -- but that's just the history of partisan politics since Nixon.
This could change, so I'm not trying to say there's no hope. The spate of progressive candidates winning their primaries is encouraging. It will take several cycles to repair the damage, but as much of that damage was caused by DNC telling their voters what they'll get. That's shooting yourself in the foot too. Biden moves like a glacier vaguely leftward, so again maybe that's changing too.
I understand that many folks can't see past that. If electoral solutions are all you got, every problem looks like it can be solved by a vote.
Oh, and before you say it: I'm voting and voting Biden. There's no other choice in this broken republic.
I think you are wrong here. I think establishment Democrats like Never Ending War. They like police brutality. They like screwing over the poor and middle class and giving money to the rich. Those are their goals, they just need to pretend that they aren't and they really want to help the average American.
I think this because I see what they've been doing since 1992 at least and maybe since 1976. I read the speeches they give to the bankers, I see the laws they propose. I watch the current Democratic Presidential nominee say over and over again that he wants to cut Social Security. I see that he cheered the Clinton crime bill and those welfare cuts. I see that the current bankruptcy bill is basically his baby. And he like Obama is the choice of the establishment.
This is what they do and what they say. What can I assume from this if it isn't that their constituency isn't you and me at all, but George Carlin's "Big Club" that we are not members of.
Take your point, but given the current situation, even if I accept your interpretation (and I don't), doesn't the political situation require that they move left? Like I said elsewhere, they can't just sell Biden as Less Senile Trump.
In my experience Democrats are gutless rather than Secret Republicans. Most of them don't have the imagination to follow their youngers-and-betters like AOC. But like the GOP they stand on the precipice of extinction -- they're several steps further from the edge than the Trump people but if they blow this (by losing, or by winning and not doing anything with it), get ready for President Bongino and the end of everything.
Remember the New Deal didn't happen because FDR was a Bolshevik but because he knew fortune favors the brave.
I hear you Roy, and basically you are correct too. What the disagreement outlines is the inadequacy of current party identity as a way to understand our predicament. This probably happened for a while too when the Whigs and Federalists went out of style around the time of JQ Adams.
Democrats don't have to be "secret Republicans" to be all in for corporations or war or white supremacy. There are of course a few who are or seem to be or promise to be (Amy McGrath, I'm looking at you), but what's developing seems to be a tripartite partisan divide. You got yer ultra-nationalists on the DJT-Tucker Carlson end. Then you have your corporate toady party that dabbles in both nationalism and the bare minimum of progress needed to keep the pot from boiling over. And there's a long-developing progressive wing that the other two have waged a propaganda war to suppress and exclude. What we'll call those parties is unclear, or where they will end up going.
Roy, you invoke FDR and how he read the room successfully to make much-needed changes. Certainly true, and possibly encouraging for some progress on the hundred fronts that need attention now. But without reckoning, without real justice the seventy year plan to roll back all those good things will start all over again. I guess the good thing is that civilization will pretty much have collapsed by then.
Agreed. The distinction among Democrats is that some of them are a lot more timid than others. Everybody wants to make things better, and Biden has had a more limited idea than many of what's possible.
Similarly, Biden actually wrote the 1994 crime bill, but it was the Congressional Black Caucus that put it through the House against overwhelming Republican opposition to its $7 billion in aid for the gang-wracked inner cities of the time https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/18/us/blacks-relent-on-crime-bill-but-not-without-bitterness.html (the issue that make John Lewis feel bad about voting for it wasn't the incarceration provisions, either, but the capital punishment, on which he was clearly morally right, but which didn't turn out to be the most harmful part of the bill), because they thought on balance it would do some good—Biden and Lewis alike failed to anticipate the crazed misuse certain state governments would make of it, as is also the case with the terrible 1996 welfare bill http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2016/02/welfare-as-we-knew-it.html.
Well as I've said before you are more optimistic than I am. What I see is constant movement to the right, and I have no reason to think that they are more far sighted than the Roman aristocracy.
Hell yes -- I absolutely agree with you. I was trying to avoid another Krebs meltdown. And usually saying "Dems are incompetent" around here will net you a few angry outbursts. My attempts at diplomacy obscure the real issue here, and I'm glad you're pushing back.
I realized after hitting "post" that I omitted an important caveat. After "The DNC Dems definitely believe they represent their real intended constituency" I needed to say what you said. "That constituency ain't you and me." George Carlin was rarely wrong.
Otherwise fully in agreement. Like Roy's post was outlining for conserva-bizarerie, mainstream Dems totally rely on appearances of incompetence to mask their subservience to corporations, Big War, Big Surveillance, and oppressive law enforcement structures. Those bad-faith takes from the media and out-of-power Pubs are warning shots to toe the line. And they fall into place every time.
That's why I think a commission to see how we are losing to fascists will never happen. Why BLM will have to explode again in another 4-5 years. Why we'll have a smart fascist GOP candidate in another four years. I mean, shit, the Lincoln Project is just a way to buy liberal consent in a renewed attack on democracy.
Not sanguine at all, my dude. Even if minor things look promising.
Hard disagree. Nearly everything in your 2nd paragraph can be explained by "hey, this is what we have to do if we want to win elections."
The Democrats start with good intentions, and do actual good things, sometimes. Those good things don't always go nearly as far as they should - FDR had to limit how much the New Deal helped Black folks so he could get Southern segregationist Dems on board, as just one example of many - but the history of this country, post-WWII, is Democrats coming up with plans, the right and the mainstream media doing their best to paint them as big-government-wasteful, if not downright anti-American, and voters buying the propaganda and moving the country, and the Democrats, ever rightward.
Do you honestly think that Blacks would support a party at a 90-95% level if half of what you said about its "goals" was actually true? I mean, come on.
Sucks that the party's reasonably united. Of course, by definition, the Dems cn never be as unified as Republican goose steppers, but for Dems, nah, they got their shit together. OTOH, the Trump and GOP brands are both toxic, so it doesn't even matter if the Dems are united or, you know, their normal selves.
You're dead on with the misspelled-word thing. That's why I have always assumed it was done on purpose. (I bet Trump's actual spelling is *worse* -- like, childish and harder to read.) As for the Sartre anti-Semitism analysis, we had a good object lesson on that last month: https://alicublog.blogspot.com/2020/06/trends-in-trump-twitter.html
Understand about the "massive effort" and I think one decent thing that may come of this is, in order to win their campaign against Trump and Trumpism, even the shitty Dems will be forced to do a lot of educating, because you can't just say Biden is less senile than Trump.
I marvel at how easily Trump baits Democrats into becoming prescriptive grammarians. I'm surprised he doesn't salt his speeches with an occasional "ain't" just to drive them bonkers.
Yes sir, Roy. That Sartre thing has been around a lot and I had forgotten you had been talking about inanity in your recent interactions with the fashies.
It is encouraging seeing some of the Dem elders suddenly realizing they have things to learn. About fucking time too. What I'm interested in exploring legally and politically is that if it can be determined that the appointment process for a Trump judge was based in corruption, can that judge be removed? I imagine the Justice Kennedy thing played out over and over again in the flotilla of recent appointments. Lots of ways to punch a Nazi, my darlings.
[I recently got into it with some WS archaeology fan-boi, who said to me: "I doubt you could articulate the difference between Nazism, National Socialism, and fascism. And I'm like, "Who cares if dog shit came from a poodle or German shepherd, I'm still not putting it in my mouth..."]
Before the Trump years, I would have been more generous. Now I can only echo Nigel: it goes to 11. The bastards are absolute evil. But what I hate most is that this time has done that to me. Whether it’s warped me or just opened my eyes I don’t know, but the level on which I want to see them suffer scares me every time I stop and examine it.
On both the Stupidity and Evil scales: it goes to 11.
As for conservatives having occasional good ideas etc.: sure, sometimes it can happen. George W. Bush, for example, was apparently genuinely concerned to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa, even to the point of being wiling to spend (some) money on it.
And, occasionally, individual conservatives may prove unexpectedly compassionate on some given issue that is normally a subject of their Two Minute Hates: stem-cell research, for example, or medical cannabis. However, this is invariably because, on that one point, their own ox had been gored.
As for what conservatism is, though: I can recommend Corey Robin on the topic. Or, distilled even further down to its true essence, conservatism is as Frank Wilhoit once described it in a comment at Crooked Timber: The force of the law must protect but not bind US, and must bind but not protect THEM. I paraphrase, but do go and read the while damn thing:
I will only add that conservatives in my experience only back reform movements that SEEM counter-intuitive (that is, as opposed to obvious grifts like education "reform") as a sop to their base's inability to admit that cruelty and self-interest are all they believe in. This goes back to Buckley's crusade for that one prisoner he liked in the 60s. For instance, some of the gang were making noise about prison reform until Trump got in. (Even Bernie Kerik was in on that!) Once the mask dropped in 2016 they quieted down, and since liberals started backing re-enfranchisement of felons they've fallen silent -- though I think I've seen a few *refer* to their prison reform efforts as if they were live, probably as a tic.
There's a stupid-vs.-evil dilemma buried in Wilhoit's great formula, though, the one that's explicit in Anatole France, "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." Likewise rich and poor are equally permitted to acquire corporate monopolies and prevent workers from organizing. Conservatives don't think they're thinking about two different legal codes but one that applies to everybody alike because they're too stupid to see it? Or because they're too psychopathic to recognize the human existence of THEM?
The leaders of the movement are a 7/10 on the evil scale. I think there are those who try to be evil but are hindered by their own massive stupidity, like Matt Gaetz, yet more often you have vicious evil like Mitch McConnell or the "do whatever to keep money/power" evil that are most Republicans. Pundits and writers likely fall along a similar vein. A person like Laura Ingraham is smart enough to know the smell of bullshit, but I'm also willing to concede that these people get stuck in their own bubble and probably start to get high on their own supply. Bill Barr, for example, is a lunatic, but also smart enough to be effective. That Trump is the current leader of the movement is possibly a benefit, because he is a raging doofus. Conservatives used to be better at being subtle in their nefarious ways, but Trump is the kind of guy that just shouts the N Word and thinks he made a compelling case.
For the common people who consider themselves part of the movement (but would get pushed off a cliff at any moment if it benefited a millionaire), there is some level of evil - like laughing at someone getting hurt - but mostly they are just dumb. Dig up that video of a town hall with people ranting about masks, and you see they certainly have the courage of their convictions, but their belief system is no more grounded in reality than a 2 year old who thinks a fairy exchanges enamel for dollars.
People who consider themselves aligned with Democrats make up a wide, diverse population. Sometimes the Democratic Party seems a bit of a mess of ideas, but that's the beauty of a group of people testing various concepts and bringing different insights. The GOP has shed adherents every decade to the point its become an insular, incestuous band of anger, greed and racism.
"The GOP has shed adherents every decade to the point its become an insular, incestuous band of anger, greed and racism. "
I read somewhere that this was its condition in 1952, too, after 20 years of Democrat-led progress on every front, and this was the reason Ike chose to run as a Republican. He worried that if the GOP suffered another loss, it would collapse into an angry fascistic core of lunatics and assholes, and that they would cause dire trouble for the nation. His intent was to rehabilitate the party by attracting mainstream members and driving it center-right. There's merit to that, but... I don't think there's any Ike hoping to mitigate them in 2024. I just see Tom Cotton and a few other wolves circling, with plans to make things worse.
Agree on stilts. What we fear is Trumpism without the buffoonery, narcissism, and stupidity. Hence Tucker Carlson? One thing worth mentioning in this context is, the Millenials and Gen-Xers have very little for which to thank capitalism (as it's currently practiced)--other, that is, than debt, internships, crap jobs, unaffordable housing, and now societal lockdown.
Which to me suggests that they're ripe either for socialism/democratic socialism (yay) or fascism (boo). It'll be a race between the Dems' ability to acknowledge and serve this need, and the GOP's cynical ability to exploit it.
Oh Roy. How to choose, how to choose. My wise mother often says "You can't fix stupid," but I fear that you can't fix evil either. And I honestly don't know which is worse, since the Evil Ones can get the Stupid Ones to follow them, adding the power of numbers to the power of E. Coincidentally, this terrific documentarian just died. Kevin Rafferty. He is best known for "The Atomic Cafe," but also did a one on neo-Nazis called "Blood in the Face" (from 1991). I just watched it last night on Kanopy. The sheer stupidity of some of these people is horrible and frightening -- and, yes, Evil with a capital E. Thank you for such a thought-provoking post
Well said, A. I'd heard about Rafferty's passing and I've seen Atomic Cafe, but it sounds like time to see Blood in the Face for the first time, if I can bear it.
It's pretty sordid. Tonight I'm watching another of his called "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29," which Manohla Dargis called "preposterously entertaining" and of which Rafferty himself said "was the best time I've ever had making a movie. It was a lot more fun than hanging out with the Ku Klux Klan, for instance." Cool footnote: Rafferty is the guy who pioneered the doc with no voiceover. He championed Michael Moore's career. Moore himself appears in Blood in the Face as an interviewer. Cool stuff
OT: do you get Kanopy through your local library? Mine discontinued the service because it was too expensive. Is there another way to access it that you are using?
My library still supports it -- I suppose you can get a card from somewhere else, or use a distant friend's. (Assuming they don't use Kanopy, because the service is not unlimited -- you get like 7 uses in a month, and when you run out have to wait for the first of the month to start over.)
All I know is that Kanopy has a pay-per-view pricing system that kicks in even if a viewer watches 30 seconds of the film (or if they stop watching it and restart it later), and that gets both expensive and unpredictable. (I had no problem limiting my viewing to X number of films per month.) There's this from Gothamist (6-25-19):
"According to Variety, 'The Queens Public Library said only about 6,000 of its 1 million cardholders used the service and that Kanopy was planning to raise the subscription rate to about $125,000 annually.' (The NYC libraries are not the first to part ways with Kanopy; Stanford University also ended their deal last year.)"
I saw Blood in the Face on PBS 20 years ago. It was so powerful that some scenes have stayed with me even today, despite the fact I’ve seen all the way through maybe three times. The scene where the title phrase is explained is chilling af.
I’ve seen The Atomic Cafe a dozen times and used it as a class exercise in teaching about propaganda.
Evil as stupid. In the late '70s the most important revelation I gleaned from working in politics was that (at that time) almost no elected officials actually believed in God. But they all insisted they did. Calling someone an atheist always started a fight. Even obvious atheists in office had church affiliations.
If they lie about God, what won't they lie about? Of course the real tragedy is that we now have officeholders who do believe in a cartoon version of God. Which is worse: followers of a cardboard Jehovah or hypocrites proclaiming faith they don't have?
It's called pandering when politicians tell you what you want to hear no matter how stupid. We have a system based on pandering now, lying is encouraged. If you tell the truth the media will destroy you. I honestly cannot think of one single truthful politician who gets good media. Not one.
Someone once expressed concern to Don Regan about Ronald Reagan's cozying up to the religious Right. "Don't you worry about that kind of influence? That they might want a state religion?"
"We'll never have a state religion," said Regan, "because Ron likes to sleep in on Sundays and having a state religion would mean he'd have to go to church."
We have a default state religion anyway. Apparently we taxpayers have just reimbursed the Catholic Church for their child sex abuse settlements through the pretense of coronavirus aid.
Sometimes I start feeling really paranoid about the power Catholics have amassed, 6-3 on the Supreme Court and congressional leadership from Gingrich through McCarthy and 20 years of McDonnell and who knows what else culminating in the appalling Bully Barr, and votes from all the evangelicals who are supposed to be Protestants but seduced by Catholic intriguers into thinking abortion is important...
As I recall, the evangelical folks got talked into being outraged over abortion by their leaders. Those leaders picked abortion as a rally cause because they knew the folks could be worked up over and would turn out to vote for Reagan.
And it was vital to get Reagan in the White House because St. Ronnie had promised them he would allow their religious schools to continue getting federal tax breaks while the schools continued to actively block Black students from being admitted.
Bringing in the Catholics is the paranoid part, and my contribution. Still, Jerry Falwell was lying when he said he came up with it on his own; he had a partner https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133, and the partner was Catholic: Paul Weyrich, a Melkite Greek Catholic (which is part of the Roman Catholic church--he'd moved from the Latin branch after Vatican II), founder of the Heritage Foundation, and associate of Laszlo Pasztor, a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, and the person who said, "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." He is so at the center of all these developments.
I was referring to just general Christianity as our state religion, I didn't make that clear. I try not to get too paranoid about Catholicism because having grown up one I remember being told by friends that their parents were trying to convert me to less satanic religions. On the other hand, they are basically stroking a hairless cat and peering into the piranha moat through their fancy monocles, so it's hard not to get paranoid about them. They're not the Whore of Baby;on and they don't worship the Pope, but they do deliberately ignore the rape of children and fuck around in affairs of the state while demanding tax free status. Opus Dei doesn't help.
See, this is a funny crack, but it irks the hell out of me that so many people playing the game on the GOP side don't look more than two moves ahead. We'll never have a state religion in 1984, sure, but buddy, your guy sure laid the groundwork for a lot of self-righteous con men and dupes to start building toward one for the next 30 years, so maybe think about what you're putting in motion with your rhetoric and alliances. Do I think that Rush Limbaugh in 1990 genuinely wanted to create a world where he had to immediately regret that he said something nice about Obama on the occasion of Bin Laden's death? I do not. But Rush did not think through what 2011 he was creating when he started lying melodramatically about everything in 1990. He just wanted to create a '91 where he had more money. Congrats, asshole, but you grabbed the mic, and it comes with a responsibility to tell the truth, so that we don't end up... here.
"But Rush did not think through what 2011 he was creating when he started lying melodramatically about everything in 1990."
Sorry to do this, but I disagree. I remember listening to Rush in 1990, and all I could think was "This man *hates* democracy and the democratic process." He might not have expected God-Emperor Trump, but boy did he work hard to make it happen.
Limbaugh, Hannity, and their epigoni: pure evil. Rupert Murdoch and anyone he pays to make people stupid, or worse, dead: 100% evil. Anyone in government, media, or business who has downplayed the COVID pandemic, turned prevention and safety into political bullshit, and caused thousands of deaths: evil, with a frisson of monumental imbecility.
If "conservatism" was ever a "philosophy" of governance it mutated long ago into malevolent, willful ignorance, culminating in the present malignancy of Trumpism, which is evil, cruel, and stupid, in exponential quantities. Is it even a "movement" anymore, assuming it ever was?
Either way, I feel like a version of Evelyn in "Chinatown" -- "It's stupid!" (slap) "It's evil!" (slap) "Stupid!" (slap) "Evil!" (slap) "It's stupevil! Just stop hitting me!"
After a certain point, the distinction between stupid and evil vanishes. "Young boys throw stones at frogs for sport. The frogs, however, die in earnest" is one good analogy. For the frogs, it doesn't matter whether the boys throwing the stones hate frogs or not.
So it is with conservatives. Take Jonah Goldberg. Is he stupid? Without a doubt. Only a man of towering stupidity could write a book titled "Liberal Fascism" and claim that Hitler's vegetarianism and the fact that the Nazi Party had "socialism" as part of its name proves that fascism is a liberal political movement.
Yet, from this magnum dopus has spring an entire new cottage industry of wingnuts waving Jonah's work around and calling every liberal thing fascism. Did you know that advocating for voting rights is fascism? Or believing that the police should not have the right to summarily execute citizens? And the only way to keep this fascism from taking hold of the country is to send in the military to massacre the protesters, or to have the FBI arrest those who would like to see every citizen vote.
Thus from Jonah's profoundly stupid book does profound evil grow. It perhaps started as a joke, but those using it now to bolster their arguments mean for real people to die in earnest.
In addition to evil/dumb, I add pandering to the ignorant and pathological. Then again, I am by training and disposition what you can call an infinite shades of gray guy.
As for modern conservative intellectual philosophy, well, there's none. It's just nihilistic desire for destruction.
pandering to the ignorant and pathological is in my view evil.
Where do we put the looters, the vulture capitalists, the ones who know about the science but exploit and expand the ignorance because it's just so lucrative? I perceive them as nihilists, but a kind of nihilist that loves and enjoys the here-and-now while knowing full well it has a shelf-life of maybe ten or twenty years. (I think they are not nihilists, in other words. I need another word.)
I've mentioned to acquaintances that these people must either hate their kids and grandkids or be utterly indifferent to them, and I'm told, oh, their kids and grandkids will be just fine, there's money for generations. But I don't think they will be just fine; things are accelerating. So it's like a conscious attempt to imitate and exploit ignorance. That seems pathological. But maybe I am overestimating their ability to recognize a fact and I'm just dreaming that they know what they are doing (and what they are NOT doing) and persist anyway just to get some very fine years in (for them) before it collapses. Maybe they really believe that everything is going to be just fine, for them.
ETA: I guess the WIlhoit piece explains it, so thanks for that: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." I don't know about pathological or ignorant, but this is certainly traditional.
"the ones who know about the science but exploit and expand the ignorance because it's just so lucrative? I perceive them as nihilists, but"
A friend of mine who worked in the oil industry gave me an insight. A bunch of wells that were supposed to run dry in the 90s didn't -- because the engineers devised ways to get more oil out. So the wells produced a lot more, not because the dire predictive science was wrong about how much oil there was, but because the adaptive science solved that problem. So some of these vultures are, I figure, reckless idealists. There's a faith that the hugest problems really will all be solved at the last second by human genius -- just like always -- and in the meantime, if they sit on these problems, they live like kings.
"There's a faith that the hugest problems really will all be solved at the last second by human genius -- just like always..." Isn't it pretty to think so? But let's assume your theory about what the "vultures" believe is correct, which it may well be. Their faith in genius is motivating them, and their government enablers, to take a huge gamble -- and if they're wrong, all humanity pays the price. Yes, even the vultures themselves, unless they're lucky enough to either die like David Koch or flee into space with Elon Musk before things get *really* bad.
Oh, for sure! They're a nightmare. They're also the same people who are voting to cut research funding, which makes human genius much less likely to emerge, and they oppose immigration, which means if we do get miracle tech, it's more likely to appear in China. These bright-eyed idealists who make "genius" part of their battle plan are genuinely some of the dumbest people alive.
Exactly right; it was basically every Jerry Pournelle column from the Arab oil embargo for the next decade, except for simple hate-screeds against anyone too hippy/commie for his tastes. All I can add is that being who they are, these rampant individualists call it 'the genius of the Market', as if only the threat of poverty or the lure of wealth made people clever—perhaps many of them rarely know the extreme pleasure that finding a solution brings in itself..
Roy Edrosojust now
Reminds me of this Federalist story where the guy said “Interstellar” showed global warming was no big deal because in that movie they fucked up the planet but American Ingenuity figured out how to fix it.
And, in fact, human ingenuity did not solve mankind's existential dilemma but, in fact, the unnamed alien deus ex machina that taught them where and how to go. Interstellar is, IMO, a beautiful story and certainly Matthew McConaughey's best film to date but it certainly did not demonstrate some sort of "get out of climate jail free" card for humans.
And even if that had happened in the story, "Interstellar" wouldn't "prove" anything because it's A WORK OF FICTION.
N, the >1%ers' spawn will be fine.
It's an extractive economy and that's not changing any time soon.
As a whole the conservative movement is nothing but an infinite continuum of stupid-evil; you can only assign numbers to individual cases. I'm 99% atheist, but it fascinates me now how the so-called issues have become biblical. We are discussing some serious right v. wrong, light v. dark, angelic v. satanic stuff.
I have repeatedly challenged my tiny social media audience to name their own "mankind's greater and lesser angels" ("you can even use the 7 deadly ones!") to discuss them in terms of today's politics, political parties, and politicians, and nobody ever bites.
Resolved: the conservative movement in this country has become the home of mankind's lesser angels.
Fallen angels, surely? But then we'd assume they were once at home in Heaven. I refuse to believe this of Charlie Kirk.
Well, it would definitely reinforce my decision to leave Catholicism if he was in their heaven.
I just wanted to discuss it in terms of simple ones: charity vs. greed; kind vs. mean; hate vs. love; honesty vs. dishonesty and so on. No takers.
In fairness, I've purged most of the conservatives I had on those platforms. So it could just be me.
Mostly “types” of stupid. 1.) Just plain stupid. 2.) Pretend stupid to blend in with stupid. 3.) Stupid to think they fooled Jesus. 4.) Stupid to think they are untouchable. Feel free to state your observed types.
I remember that first Voice column, Roy! And you haven’t lost your touch.
This is a very hard call for me to make because I think the evil is stupid – for example, conservatives/GOP can’t knowingly impoverish and kill their own supporters, and gin up white supremacy while refusing to broaden their appeal beyond their shrinking white base, and still continue to win elections or turn a profit; I also think the stupid is evil – all the mutating conspiracy theories on the Right from QAnon to 5G to anti-vaxxers/and anti-maskers all at the very least make people distrust their neighbors and at the worst lead to suffering and death.
So maybe I’d say 5/5 but I’d prefer to ignore the laws of mathematics and say it’s 100% of each.
I've given top marks in both directions myself! It's easy enough to believe.
They’re all evil, some more banal than others. On the bright side, polling today showed a whopping 67% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of race and the pandemic. Sure ~80% of Republicans still say he’s doing great but, banality of evil, meet the culmination of 50+ years of American pseudoconservatism.
I'm gonna say about sixty percent stupid, forty five percent evil. I know that doesn't add up to 100, but conservatives will be the first to whine at you about how hard they have to work compared to those lazy affirmative action hires. But, that's mostly because I'm watching Washington Journal, and Grover Norquist seems to think people who disagree with him should all be calling in on the democrat line and that CSPAN should be demanding to see their voter registration card before putting them on the air. Meanwhile, random caller on the independent line is demanding to know why democrats are even allowed since "the Constitution guarantees a republican form of government".
Even this is a good sign, in that policing their own intellectual borders is a sign of weakness.
Evil parading as stupid, and it's deadly effective.
Case in point: DJT tweets some awful policy his Nazis are cooking up but misspells a word. Molly Jong-Fast, Rick Wilson, and Steve Schmidt (and others) spend the rest of the day tweeting about how stupid the president is. The misspelling trends all day long. Evil plan wins the day. In five fucking years the mainstream has utterly failed to learn to focus. It's all about "own" and "destroys" and all that tired bullshit.
Another case in point: QAnon. Massive sophisticated psy-op that has turned an alarming swath of the population into an anti-liberal democracy army by getting to believe things even though those things will kill them and the ones they love. All of the byzantine intricacies are certainly stupid, but it has utterly evil intent.
Sartre once said something pungent about how inanity was the point of anti-semitic discourse because it can't be argued with, disproven. They just exhaust you and seem to win. Every day Roy and any other publicly progressive figure gets this from whatever direction. Talib Kweli is a frequent target. WOC in my field bear its burden.
All I'm saying is that unless there's a massive effort to expose all the lies and machinations that made the conservation revolution possible by the ruling party -- an effort that won't happen in any conceivable timeline, since it would implicate Dems, Dem donors, major media corporations, and others, we'll have Viktor Carlson as the GOP contender in 2024 and he may well the fuck win.
Especially since in my lifetime I have only seen mainstream Dems shoot themselves in the foot every time they get power.
I think that you can only assume that the mainstream Dems "shoot themselves in the foot," if you think that they are not representing their real constituency.
Oh no, not at all. The DNC Dems definitely believe they represent their real intended constituency. And that is a part of the problem.
What I mean by "shoot themselves in the foot" (and I know the True-Blue will gnash their teeth over it) is that they soon find themselves lost and bewildered in mazes of bad-faith media coverage and RW "suggestions" that twist them into pretzels and cause all their intentions to fall apart. They try to out-Reagan the GOP. Try to out-war John Motherfucking Bolton (as seems to be a current now). Try to out-cop actual fascists. Plagiarize Republican plans for social safety nets instead of making an actual systemic change that protects every American. People get tired of them. Vote for Pubs in droves. Rinse and repeat. Then they can huddle safely as the minority party again and complain that they don't have any power. So I mean, sure, be offended by it -- but that's just the history of partisan politics since Nixon.
This could change, so I'm not trying to say there's no hope. The spate of progressive candidates winning their primaries is encouraging. It will take several cycles to repair the damage, but as much of that damage was caused by DNC telling their voters what they'll get. That's shooting yourself in the foot too. Biden moves like a glacier vaguely leftward, so again maybe that's changing too.
I understand that many folks can't see past that. If electoral solutions are all you got, every problem looks like it can be solved by a vote.
Oh, and before you say it: I'm voting and voting Biden. There's no other choice in this broken republic.
I think you are wrong here. I think establishment Democrats like Never Ending War. They like police brutality. They like screwing over the poor and middle class and giving money to the rich. Those are their goals, they just need to pretend that they aren't and they really want to help the average American.
I think this because I see what they've been doing since 1992 at least and maybe since 1976. I read the speeches they give to the bankers, I see the laws they propose. I watch the current Democratic Presidential nominee say over and over again that he wants to cut Social Security. I see that he cheered the Clinton crime bill and those welfare cuts. I see that the current bankruptcy bill is basically his baby. And he like Obama is the choice of the establishment.
This is what they do and what they say. What can I assume from this if it isn't that their constituency isn't you and me at all, but George Carlin's "Big Club" that we are not members of.
Take your point, but given the current situation, even if I accept your interpretation (and I don't), doesn't the political situation require that they move left? Like I said elsewhere, they can't just sell Biden as Less Senile Trump.
In my experience Democrats are gutless rather than Secret Republicans. Most of them don't have the imagination to follow their youngers-and-betters like AOC. But like the GOP they stand on the precipice of extinction -- they're several steps further from the edge than the Trump people but if they blow this (by losing, or by winning and not doing anything with it), get ready for President Bongino and the end of everything.
Remember the New Deal didn't happen because FDR was a Bolshevik but because he knew fortune favors the brave.
I hear you Roy, and basically you are correct too. What the disagreement outlines is the inadequacy of current party identity as a way to understand our predicament. This probably happened for a while too when the Whigs and Federalists went out of style around the time of JQ Adams.
Democrats don't have to be "secret Republicans" to be all in for corporations or war or white supremacy. There are of course a few who are or seem to be or promise to be (Amy McGrath, I'm looking at you), but what's developing seems to be a tripartite partisan divide. You got yer ultra-nationalists on the DJT-Tucker Carlson end. Then you have your corporate toady party that dabbles in both nationalism and the bare minimum of progress needed to keep the pot from boiling over. And there's a long-developing progressive wing that the other two have waged a propaganda war to suppress and exclude. What we'll call those parties is unclear, or where they will end up going.
Roy, you invoke FDR and how he read the room successfully to make much-needed changes. Certainly true, and possibly encouraging for some progress on the hundred fronts that need attention now. But without reckoning, without real justice the seventy year plan to roll back all those good things will start all over again. I guess the good thing is that civilization will pretty much have collapsed by then.
Agreed. The distinction among Democrats is that some of them are a lot more timid than others. Everybody wants to make things better, and Biden has had a more limited idea than many of what's possible.
I spent some time with the "speeches" Hillary Clinton gave bankers in 2014-15 and came away with an impression pretty different from the labels posted on them by the curators at WikiLeaks. http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2016/10/encounter-with-vampire-squid.html Just saying.
Similarly, Biden actually wrote the 1994 crime bill, but it was the Congressional Black Caucus that put it through the House against overwhelming Republican opposition to its $7 billion in aid for the gang-wracked inner cities of the time https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/18/us/blacks-relent-on-crime-bill-but-not-without-bitterness.html (the issue that make John Lewis feel bad about voting for it wasn't the incarceration provisions, either, but the capital punishment, on which he was clearly morally right, but which didn't turn out to be the most harmful part of the bill), because they thought on balance it would do some good—Biden and Lewis alike failed to anticipate the crazed misuse certain state governments would make of it, as is also the case with the terrible 1996 welfare bill http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2016/02/welfare-as-we-knew-it.html.
As to FDR, he also had the sense to surround himself with advisors who would tell him what the results of a given program would be instead of worrying whether it was too "left" or "right". Biden has been doing good work in that direction, which is why his program keeps getting more radical during the covid shutdown https://www.newsweek.com/2020/06/12/joe-biden-moderate-plans-most-radical-economic-overhaul-since-fdr-1507674.html, as with the astonishing housing plan that just came out https://www.vox.com/2020/7/9/21316912/joe-biden-housing-plan-section-8.
Thanks Yastreblyansky, your comments are too-infrequent but always wise & informed
Well as I've said before you are more optimistic than I am. What I see is constant movement to the right, and I have no reason to think that they are more far sighted than the Roman aristocracy.
FDR was saving capitalism from the capitalists. Said so himself somewhere, allegedly.
Exactly.
Hell yes -- I absolutely agree with you. I was trying to avoid another Krebs meltdown. And usually saying "Dems are incompetent" around here will net you a few angry outbursts. My attempts at diplomacy obscure the real issue here, and I'm glad you're pushing back.
I realized after hitting "post" that I omitted an important caveat. After "The DNC Dems definitely believe they represent their real intended constituency" I needed to say what you said. "That constituency ain't you and me." George Carlin was rarely wrong.
Otherwise fully in agreement. Like Roy's post was outlining for conserva-bizarerie, mainstream Dems totally rely on appearances of incompetence to mask their subservience to corporations, Big War, Big Surveillance, and oppressive law enforcement structures. Those bad-faith takes from the media and out-of-power Pubs are warning shots to toe the line. And they fall into place every time.
That's why I think a commission to see how we are losing to fascists will never happen. Why BLM will have to explode again in another 4-5 years. Why we'll have a smart fascist GOP candidate in another four years. I mean, shit, the Lincoln Project is just a way to buy liberal consent in a renewed attack on democracy.
Not sanguine at all, my dude. Even if minor things look promising.
I’m afraid you’re right.
"....they like eat hot chip and lie."
I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself. Carry on.
Hard disagree. Nearly everything in your 2nd paragraph can be explained by "hey, this is what we have to do if we want to win elections."
The Democrats start with good intentions, and do actual good things, sometimes. Those good things don't always go nearly as far as they should - FDR had to limit how much the New Deal helped Black folks so he could get Southern segregationist Dems on board, as just one example of many - but the history of this country, post-WWII, is Democrats coming up with plans, the right and the mainstream media doing their best to paint them as big-government-wasteful, if not downright anti-American, and voters buying the propaganda and moving the country, and the Democrats, ever rightward.
Do you honestly think that Blacks would support a party at a 90-95% level if half of what you said about its "goals" was actually true? I mean, come on.
Voting for Old Joe isn't enough. The entire GOP has to be voted out of power.
Sucks that the party's reasonably united. Of course, by definition, the Dems cn never be as unified as Republican goose steppers, but for Dems, nah, they got their shit together. OTOH, the Trump and GOP brands are both toxic, so it doesn't even matter if the Dems are united or, you know, their normal selves.
You're dead on with the misspelled-word thing. That's why I have always assumed it was done on purpose. (I bet Trump's actual spelling is *worse* -- like, childish and harder to read.) As for the Sartre anti-Semitism analysis, we had a good object lesson on that last month: https://alicublog.blogspot.com/2020/06/trends-in-trump-twitter.html
Understand about the "massive effort" and I think one decent thing that may come of this is, in order to win their campaign against Trump and Trumpism, even the shitty Dems will be forced to do a lot of educating, because you can't just say Biden is less senile than Trump.
I marvel at how easily Trump baits Democrats into becoming prescriptive grammarians. I'm surprised he doesn't salt his speeches with an occasional "ain't" just to drive them bonkers.
Totally!
That too would have to be scripted. I don't think Trump can use ain't properly. He'd probably say something like "If it ain't broke, it ain't fixed."
Yes sir, Roy. That Sartre thing has been around a lot and I had forgotten you had been talking about inanity in your recent interactions with the fashies.
It is encouraging seeing some of the Dem elders suddenly realizing they have things to learn. About fucking time too. What I'm interested in exploring legally and politically is that if it can be determined that the appointment process for a Trump judge was based in corruption, can that judge be removed? I imagine the Justice Kennedy thing played out over and over again in the flotilla of recent appointments. Lots of ways to punch a Nazi, my darlings.
[I recently got into it with some WS archaeology fan-boi, who said to me: "I doubt you could articulate the difference between Nazism, National Socialism, and fascism. And I'm like, "Who cares if dog shit came from a poodle or German shepherd, I'm still not putting it in my mouth..."]
Schmidt, Wilson, et al—Gaaah! Slowly I turned...
It’s like seeing the Reformed Arsonists of America get showered with money and praise because they stopped burning down daycares and old folks homes.
I looked at that first line and thought you were talking Helmut and Harold abandoning socialism in the 70s.
Before the Trump years, I would have been more generous. Now I can only echo Nigel: it goes to 11. The bastards are absolute evil. But what I hate most is that this time has done that to me. Whether it’s warped me or just opened my eyes I don’t know, but the level on which I want to see them suffer scares me every time I stop and examine it.
I understand, which is why novels, movies and history are a useful counterweight.
“The good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
Right there with you, mate.
On both the Stupidity and Evil scales: it goes to 11.
As for conservatives having occasional good ideas etc.: sure, sometimes it can happen. George W. Bush, for example, was apparently genuinely concerned to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa, even to the point of being wiling to spend (some) money on it.
And, occasionally, individual conservatives may prove unexpectedly compassionate on some given issue that is normally a subject of their Two Minute Hates: stem-cell research, for example, or medical cannabis. However, this is invariably because, on that one point, their own ox had been gored.
As for what conservatism is, though: I can recommend Corey Robin on the topic. Or, distilled even further down to its true essence, conservatism is as Frank Wilhoit once described it in a comment at Crooked Timber: The force of the law must protect but not bind US, and must bind but not protect THEM. I paraphrase, but do go and read the while damn thing:
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288
Robin is great on the topic.
I will only add that conservatives in my experience only back reform movements that SEEM counter-intuitive (that is, as opposed to obvious grifts like education "reform") as a sop to their base's inability to admit that cruelty and self-interest are all they believe in. This goes back to Buckley's crusade for that one prisoner he liked in the 60s. For instance, some of the gang were making noise about prison reform until Trump got in. (Even Bernie Kerik was in on that!) Once the mask dropped in 2016 they quieted down, and since liberals started backing re-enfranchisement of felons they've fallen silent -- though I think I've seen a few *refer* to their prison reform efforts as if they were live, probably as a tic.
Prison reform will make a comeback soon as soooo many Trump administration officials begin contemplating the jail terms that await them.
There's a stupid-vs.-evil dilemma buried in Wilhoit's great formula, though, the one that's explicit in Anatole France, "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." Likewise rich and poor are equally permitted to acquire corporate monopolies and prevent workers from organizing. Conservatives don't think they're thinking about two different legal codes but one that applies to everybody alike because they're too stupid to see it? Or because they're too psychopathic to recognize the human existence of THEM?
The leaders of the movement are a 7/10 on the evil scale. I think there are those who try to be evil but are hindered by their own massive stupidity, like Matt Gaetz, yet more often you have vicious evil like Mitch McConnell or the "do whatever to keep money/power" evil that are most Republicans. Pundits and writers likely fall along a similar vein. A person like Laura Ingraham is smart enough to know the smell of bullshit, but I'm also willing to concede that these people get stuck in their own bubble and probably start to get high on their own supply. Bill Barr, for example, is a lunatic, but also smart enough to be effective. That Trump is the current leader of the movement is possibly a benefit, because he is a raging doofus. Conservatives used to be better at being subtle in their nefarious ways, but Trump is the kind of guy that just shouts the N Word and thinks he made a compelling case.
For the common people who consider themselves part of the movement (but would get pushed off a cliff at any moment if it benefited a millionaire), there is some level of evil - like laughing at someone getting hurt - but mostly they are just dumb. Dig up that video of a town hall with people ranting about masks, and you see they certainly have the courage of their convictions, but their belief system is no more grounded in reality than a 2 year old who thinks a fairy exchanges enamel for dollars.
People who consider themselves aligned with Democrats make up a wide, diverse population. Sometimes the Democratic Party seems a bit of a mess of ideas, but that's the beauty of a group of people testing various concepts and bringing different insights. The GOP has shed adherents every decade to the point its become an insular, incestuous band of anger, greed and racism.
"The GOP has shed adherents every decade to the point its become an insular, incestuous band of anger, greed and racism. "
I read somewhere that this was its condition in 1952, too, after 20 years of Democrat-led progress on every front, and this was the reason Ike chose to run as a Republican. He worried that if the GOP suffered another loss, it would collapse into an angry fascistic core of lunatics and assholes, and that they would cause dire trouble for the nation. His intent was to rehabilitate the party by attracting mainstream members and driving it center-right. There's merit to that, but... I don't think there's any Ike hoping to mitigate them in 2024. I just see Tom Cotton and a few other wolves circling, with plans to make things worse.
Agree on stilts. What we fear is Trumpism without the buffoonery, narcissism, and stupidity. Hence Tucker Carlson? One thing worth mentioning in this context is, the Millenials and Gen-Xers have very little for which to thank capitalism (as it's currently practiced)--other, that is, than debt, internships, crap jobs, unaffordable housing, and now societal lockdown.
Which to me suggests that they're ripe either for socialism/democratic socialism (yay) or fascism (boo). It'll be a race between the Dems' ability to acknowledge and serve this need, and the GOP's cynical ability to exploit it.
Off, that's a tough one. I think we're more 6+ though
Oh Roy. How to choose, how to choose. My wise mother often says "You can't fix stupid," but I fear that you can't fix evil either. And I honestly don't know which is worse, since the Evil Ones can get the Stupid Ones to follow them, adding the power of numbers to the power of E. Coincidentally, this terrific documentarian just died. Kevin Rafferty. He is best known for "The Atomic Cafe," but also did a one on neo-Nazis called "Blood in the Face" (from 1991). I just watched it last night on Kanopy. The sheer stupidity of some of these people is horrible and frightening -- and, yes, Evil with a capital E. Thank you for such a thought-provoking post
Well said, A. I'd heard about Rafferty's passing and I've seen Atomic Cafe, but it sounds like time to see Blood in the Face for the first time, if I can bear it.
It's pretty sordid. Tonight I'm watching another of his called "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29," which Manohla Dargis called "preposterously entertaining" and of which Rafferty himself said "was the best time I've ever had making a movie. It was a lot more fun than hanging out with the Ku Klux Klan, for instance." Cool footnote: Rafferty is the guy who pioneered the doc with no voiceover. He championed Michael Moore's career. Moore himself appears in Blood in the Face as an interviewer. Cool stuff
Wow. Thanks!
OT: do you get Kanopy through your local library? Mine discontinued the service because it was too expensive. Is there another way to access it that you are using?
My library still supports it -- I suppose you can get a card from somewhere else, or use a distant friend's. (Assuming they don't use Kanopy, because the service is not unlimited -- you get like 7 uses in a month, and when you run out have to wait for the first of the month to start over.)
All I know is that Kanopy has a pay-per-view pricing system that kicks in even if a viewer watches 30 seconds of the film (or if they stop watching it and restart it later), and that gets both expensive and unpredictable. (I had no problem limiting my viewing to X number of films per month.) There's this from Gothamist (6-25-19):
"According to Variety, 'The Queens Public Library said only about 6,000 of its 1 million cardholders used the service and that Kanopy was planning to raise the subscription rate to about $125,000 annually.' (The NYC libraries are not the first to part ways with Kanopy; Stanford University also ended their deal last year.)"
https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/your-library-card-will-no-longer-get-you-free-streaming-movies-through-kanopy
I saw Blood in the Face on PBS 20 years ago. It was so powerful that some scenes have stayed with me even today, despite the fact I’ve seen all the way through maybe three times. The scene where the title phrase is explained is chilling af.
I’ve seen The Atomic Cafe a dozen times and used it as a class exercise in teaching about propaganda.
E=MC^2
Evil = Morons times Communication squared.
As mass communication has become more widespread and accessible, evil can reach more morons, who then rope in other morons.
Overall, a solid 7 for evil, 3 for stupid. It's Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham over there at the 9.8 end that make me nervous.
Evil as stupid. In the late '70s the most important revelation I gleaned from working in politics was that (at that time) almost no elected officials actually believed in God. But they all insisted they did. Calling someone an atheist always started a fight. Even obvious atheists in office had church affiliations.
If they lie about God, what won't they lie about? Of course the real tragedy is that we now have officeholders who do believe in a cartoon version of God. Which is worse: followers of a cardboard Jehovah or hypocrites proclaiming faith they don't have?
It's called pandering when politicians tell you what you want to hear no matter how stupid. We have a system based on pandering now, lying is encouraged. If you tell the truth the media will destroy you. I honestly cannot think of one single truthful politician who gets good media. Not one.
Someone once expressed concern to Don Regan about Ronald Reagan's cozying up to the religious Right. "Don't you worry about that kind of influence? That they might want a state religion?"
"We'll never have a state religion," said Regan, "because Ron likes to sleep in on Sundays and having a state religion would mean he'd have to go to church."
We have a default state religion anyway. Apparently we taxpayers have just reimbursed the Catholic Church for their child sex abuse settlements through the pretense of coronavirus aid.
Sometimes I start feeling really paranoid about the power Catholics have amassed, 6-3 on the Supreme Court and congressional leadership from Gingrich through McCarthy and 20 years of McDonnell and who knows what else culminating in the appalling Bully Barr, and votes from all the evangelicals who are supposed to be Protestants but seduced by Catholic intriguers into thinking abortion is important...
As I recall, the evangelical folks got talked into being outraged over abortion by their leaders. Those leaders picked abortion as a rally cause because they knew the folks could be worked up over and would turn out to vote for Reagan.
And it was vital to get Reagan in the White House because St. Ronnie had promised them he would allow their religious schools to continue getting federal tax breaks while the schools continued to actively block Black students from being admitted.
Bringing in the Catholics is the paranoid part, and my contribution. Still, Jerry Falwell was lying when he said he came up with it on his own; he had a partner https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133, and the partner was Catholic: Paul Weyrich, a Melkite Greek Catholic (which is part of the Roman Catholic church--he'd moved from the Latin branch after Vatican II), founder of the Heritage Foundation, and associate of Laszlo Pasztor, a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, and the person who said, "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." He is so at the center of all these developments.
I was referring to just general Christianity as our state religion, I didn't make that clear. I try not to get too paranoid about Catholicism because having grown up one I remember being told by friends that their parents were trying to convert me to less satanic religions. On the other hand, they are basically stroking a hairless cat and peering into the piranha moat through their fancy monocles, so it's hard not to get paranoid about them. They're not the Whore of Baby;on and they don't worship the Pope, but they do deliberately ignore the rape of children and fuck around in affairs of the state while demanding tax free status. Opus Dei doesn't help.
Revelations was basically a long vengeance fantasy against Rome. Thus did the Church become that which it most loathed.
See, this is a funny crack, but it irks the hell out of me that so many people playing the game on the GOP side don't look more than two moves ahead. We'll never have a state religion in 1984, sure, but buddy, your guy sure laid the groundwork for a lot of self-righteous con men and dupes to start building toward one for the next 30 years, so maybe think about what you're putting in motion with your rhetoric and alliances. Do I think that Rush Limbaugh in 1990 genuinely wanted to create a world where he had to immediately regret that he said something nice about Obama on the occasion of Bin Laden's death? I do not. But Rush did not think through what 2011 he was creating when he started lying melodramatically about everything in 1990. He just wanted to create a '91 where he had more money. Congrats, asshole, but you grabbed the mic, and it comes with a responsibility to tell the truth, so that we don't end up... here.
"But Rush did not think through what 2011 he was creating when he started lying melodramatically about everything in 1990."
Sorry to do this, but I disagree. I remember listening to Rush in 1990, and all I could think was "This man *hates* democracy and the democratic process." He might not have expected God-Emperor Trump, but boy did he work hard to make it happen.
Limbaugh, Hannity, and their epigoni: pure evil. Rupert Murdoch and anyone he pays to make people stupid, or worse, dead: 100% evil. Anyone in government, media, or business who has downplayed the COVID pandemic, turned prevention and safety into political bullshit, and caused thousands of deaths: evil, with a frisson of monumental imbecility.
If "conservatism" was ever a "philosophy" of governance it mutated long ago into malevolent, willful ignorance, culminating in the present malignancy of Trumpism, which is evil, cruel, and stupid, in exponential quantities. Is it even a "movement" anymore, assuming it ever was?
Either way, I feel like a version of Evelyn in "Chinatown" -- "It's stupid!" (slap) "It's evil!" (slap) "Stupid!" (slap) "Evil!" (slap) "It's stupevil! Just stop hitting me!"