The influential conservatives in this country are now dedicated to nothing less than the ultimate delegitimization of the concept of a national self-government. Some of them are in it for the bucks; state governments are more easily bought and controlled. Some of them are in it out of pure ideology, and out of tired ideas that already have caused far too much historical mischief. Some of them are in it because, frankly, they don’t know any better. But the overriding goal of the modern conservative movement, which its adherents will make obvious no matter how truncated their convention is this week, has been to make something alien out of something that is essentially ours and, historically, the best vehicle through which to exercise our better selves, as a people and a country. Charles P. Pierce ☀
conservatives
…his audience doesn’t accept that Romney knows what is “the real, enduring best interest of African American families.” They could be wrong, but no one wins over any constituency or interest group by telling them that his understanding of their interests is better than theirs. That is essentially what Romney said early in his speech. This isn’t a problem of communication. Romney’s error here is the same one that many Americans make when they argue that better public diplomacy (by which they usually mean better P.R.) will change the way that other nations view U.S. policies. We have heard something like this before: “If only it were possible for Washington to communicate fully what it believes is the real, enduring best interest for [name of foreign nation here], that nation would support U.S. policy towards them and their region.” This is the equivalent of saying, “Of course, I am obviously right, and it is only because of your lack of understanding and my failure to explain my position clearly enough that you don’t agree with me.” This is the opposite of persuasion. The American Conservative ☀
Conservatives would have you believe that our disappointing economic performance has somehow been caused by excessive government spending, which crowds out private job creation. But the reality is that private-sector job growth has more or less matched the recoveries from the last two recessions; the big difference this time is an unprecedented fall in public employment, which is now about 1.4 million jobs less than it would be if it had grown as fast as it did under President George W. Bush. And, if we had those extra jobs, the unemployment rate would be much lower than it is — something like 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent. It sure looks as if cutting government when the economy is deeply depressed hurts rather than helps the American people. Paul Krugman ☀
The self-made myth is one of the most cherished foundation stones of the conservative theology. Nurtured by Horatio Alger and generations of beloved boys’ stories, It sits at the deep black heart of the entire right-wing worldview, where it provides the essential justification for a great many other common right-wing beliefs. It feeds the accusation that government is evil because it only exists to redistribute wealth from society’s producers (self-made, of course) and its parasites (who refuse to work). It justifies conservative rage against progressives, who are seen as wanting to use government to forcibly take away what belongs to the righteous wealthy. It’s piously invoked by hedge fund managers and oil billionaires, who think that being required to reinvest any of their wealth back into the public society that made it possible is “punishing success.” It’s the foundational belief on which all of Ayn Rand’s novels stand.
If you’ve heard it once from your Fox-watching uncle, you’ve probably heard it a hundred times. “The government never did anything for me, dammit,” he grouses. “Everything I have, I earned. Nobody ever handed me anything. I did it all on my own. I’m a self-made man.”
He’s just plain wrong. Flat-out, incontrovertibly, inarguably wrong. So profoundly wrong, in fact, that we probably won’t be able to change the national discourse on taxes, infrastructure, education, government investment, technology policy, transportation, welfare, or our future prospects as a country until we can effectively convince the country of the monumental wrongness of this one core point.
(via slacktivist)
Consider, then, what it must be like to be a true-blue Rush Limbaugh fan, or someone who thinks Michele Bachmann is a serious lawmaker with a grasp of the issues – put yourself into that person’s shoes for a moment, and consider what a nightmarish landscape the world around them must represent:
The White House has been usurped by a Kenyan socialist named Barry Soetero, who hatched an elaborate plot to pass himself off as a citizen of the United States – a plot the media refuse to even investigate. This president doesn’t just claim the right to assassinate suspected terrorists who are beyond the reach of law enforcement – he may be planning on rounding up his ideological opponents and putting them into concentration camps if he is reelected. He may have murdered a blogger who was critical of his administration, but authorities refuse to investigate. At the very least, he is plotting on disarming the American public after the election, in accordance with a secret deal cut with the UN and possibly with the assistance of foreign troops.
Again, these ideas are not relegated to the fringe of forwarded emails. Glenn Beck talked about FEMA camps on Fox News (he later debunked them, which only fueled charges of a media coverup); dozens of Republican elected officials have at least hinted that they are birthers, while an erstwhile front-runner for the GOP nomination has repeatedly claimed that Obama is not eligible to be president. The head of the NRA, and the GOP’s presidential nominee have both claimed Obama is plotting to take Americans’ guns.
In reality, Americans are safer and more secure today than at any point in human history. But inhabitants of the world of the hard-right are surrounded by danger – from mobs of thugs at home to a variety of powerful and deadly enemies abroad.
Today, American conservatism has degenerated into an intellectually and morally bankrupt ideology. It offers nothing more than bumper-sticker slogans that pander to the prejudices and ignorance of the lowest common denominator in order to enrich and empower an oligarchic elite. Angry, cruel and sneering, it is exemplified by the carnival barkers on talk radio and Fox News. High in volume, but devoid of substance, it has no long-term future because it lacks credible solutions to the range of very real problems American society is facing. Indeed, what passes for “conservatism” today is actually nothing of the sort. Modern American conservatism has forgotten its rich legacy and betrayed its best traditions. It has become infected with a virulent strain of extreme libertarianism heavily influenced by the thinking of Ayn Rand. A Phoenix Rising: Common-Good Conservatism ☀
So to attack that “belief” through logical or reasoned argument, and thereby expect it to vanish and cease to exist in a brain, is really a rather naïve idea. Certainly, it is not the wisest or most effective way of trying to “change brains,” as Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff puts it.
We’ve inherited an Enlightenment tradition of thinking of beliefs as if they’re somehow disembodied, suspended above us in the ether, and all you have to do is float up the right bit of correct information and wrong beliefs will dispel, like bursting a soap bubble.
Beliefs are physical. To attack them is like attacking one part of a person’s anatomy, almost like pricking his or her skin (or worse). And motivated reasoning might perhaps best be thought of as a defensive mechanism that is triggered by a direct attack upon a belief system, physically embodied in a brain.
What’s most disorienting is how elaborate motivated reasoning can become, especially among those who are knowledgeable or sophisticated. If we like to pretend that politics is rational and based on reason, it’s in part because we can’t believe that a think tank scholar with a Ph.D. could actually be arguing from emotions as he or she rattles of facts and statistics, or composes an entire book.
The brain is a complex and demanding machine. Given the amount of resources required to run the average brain, it’s no surprise that it takes a few shortcuts when it can. After all, it’s the ultimate multi-tasker—and needs to distribute its energy in a smart and efficient fashion. And now, a recent study published online in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that one of those energy-saving shortcuts may have us defaulting to more conservative ideology when we don’t have the resources to think through a situation. A finding that got the folks in my circle, conservative and liberal alike, talking.
In the end, it’s all basically just conservative boilerplate: a poor mother should work two full-time jobs, a middle class mother should also work two full-time jobs (or agree to sacrifice a middle class living to stay home) but a wealthy full time mother should get the same credit they do because she’s a respected member of the “job creator” class and is therefore naturally superior. It’s nice work if you can get it. Hullabaloo ☀
Liberals would do well to read Cost’s book, for reasons other than what he intended: it demonstrates how powerful the impulse is to see what you’re for as unself-interested and what the other guy is for as interest-group greed. A full sense of what conservatives object to in the Obama program can be hard to extract from daily conservative discourse. Cost provides this. You can put on his glasses and see that “Obamacare” looks like a set of deals with privileged health-care companies that got a seat at the bargaining table, that the stimulus and the financial rescue were ways of helping banks and unions that contributed to the 2008 campaign, that cap-and-trade environmental legislation was a way of rewarding big environmental groups and corporations. Even the underlying problems that these initiatives were meant to address don’t strike him as having to do with the national interest: you might favor universal health-care as an anti-inequality measure, but Cost views it as just another goody for non-majoritarian groups trying to claw more from the government. The liberal conversation has exactly the same limits: the impulse to see conservative causes as payoffs to interest groups—and conservative political successes as demonstrations of structural flaws in the political system—is well-nigh irresistible.
Because groups with wildly different perspectives dominate politics, the observation that ninety-nine per cent of Americans are being left behind economically isn’t of much use politically. The ninety-nine per cent is too big a category to be an effective political force. For all that, inequality already is a political cause, though in strange and unexpected ways. (Cost is upset about inequality, and comes close to predicting that the Republicans will be the party that takes it on, because the Democrats have become the party of Wall Street.) But if we are to go further—and get the political system to try seriously to reverse the trends of the past thirty years—somebody will have to figure out how to stitch together a coalition of distinct, smaller interest groups that, in their different ways, care deeply about inequality, and, together, can pressure Washington in favor of specific policies. It’s an unlovely business, but if you believe that government is the best instrument with which to address the problem it’s also a morally urgent one.
It is predictable that conservatives are complaining about too much attention being paid to the shooting of Trayvon Martin. There is no racial problem that I know of that conservatives would like more attention paid to. Think about it. The Trayvon Martin case becomes a big story and suddenly conservatives want to focus on the murder rate in our cities? When was the last time they cared about that? They care about it if it will help them win an argument. But actually doing something about it, by ending the drug war or equalizing school funding, well, that’s too much to expect. For the conservative movement, race is not a serious issue affecting real people on a daily basis. It is something to be used to win an argument. As Drum said, liberals use race as a cudgel at times too. The great difference is that, generally, liberals take the reality of racism seriously, while conservatives do not. Jesse Curtis ☀
‘Conservative’ is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals. the Internet’s smartest liberal blogger, Digby ☀
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