I totally understand that someone who grew up in some small town in Oklahoma or Nebraska is going to have totally different life experiences than me, and that they’ll probably have different values. I don’t have to agree with them about religion or reproductive choice or gay marriage or what it means to be an American, and I can respect that they’re coming from a totally different environment with a lot of different assumptions. What I can’t quite understand, however, is how these small, rural parts of the country have gone absolutely insane in the post-9/11 world. The way the Republicans who represent these areas are acting is so unhinged from any semblance of reality that I find it hard to explain. I mean, I understand that these folks are absolutely marinating their brains in bullshit 24/7 by listening to hate radio and Fox News, but can that really explain the totality of this onslaught of Stupid?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Based on my friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers before/after Rush and Fox, yes indeed it does explain it. As long as you understand that what legitimates it is the repetition at church, business, and community gatherings in such a way as to test what position one is supposed to have in order to stay in the good graces of one’s personal network.
It depends on their being no other legitimized messages coming through.
And then there is that politicized network of pastors. If you don’t go to one their churches, a good many of your personal network do.
The church factor is the one that most liberals don’t get. Yes, people are marinated in TV and radio, but it’s also their social networks and that starts with the churches, which give their moral imprint to the insanity. And make no mistake, most of what passes for conservativism these days is a religion. It’s all about faith, and what you believe. “Facts” are the work of Satan. And His eager tool, the Lamestream Media.
But churches aren’t exactly a new phenomenon.
Right .. but when did the Falweel’s and Pat Robertson’s start becoming such big names?
The Moral Majority was created as an alliance between Evangelicals, Baptists, and Catholics in 1979 just after the political Baptist coup in 1978 in the Southern Baptist Convention. At that point, Ralph Reed was Pat Robertson’s gofer.
The coalition was aimed to stiff the Southern Baptist Carter for having won in 1976 and to set up Ronald Reagan’s victory in Southern states that Carter had carried.
The war within the Southern Baptist church continued into the mid-1990s with many big-name Baptist universities becoming private – Baylor, Wake Forest, Furman, Mercer–because of the Southern Baptist Convention’s assault on academic freedom. By the end of Clinton’s term, the Southern Baptist Convention, much smaller, nonetheless controlled thousands of policiticized pulpits all over the country. And they have been probing the separation of church and state ever since.
Not just probing – arguing, very explicitly, that “separation of church and state” is a myth and that the US was founded as and should explicitly be a Christian nation.
No, but the conservative activism within US churches ramped up in three waves after WWII. First was the anti-communism paranoia facilitated by Catholics and mainstream Protestants. That was embedded in the commie witch hunts of that period. Upended a bit with the election of the Catholic, Democrat JFK. But Birchers were out there doubling-down. Second wave was initially limited to southern white churches after passage of the Civil Rights Acts and coded language was employed. Nixon elected. Third wave was the organized response to Roe v. Wade and knitted together the first two waves with a previously less politically active (lower voter participation) evangelical churches everywhere. Anti-LGBT rights added another decade to the power of their anti-abortion rhetoric that was getting stale by 1990. The “gospel of money” has since bought them a bit more time.
Not sure where they go from here as their flocks are mostly getting poorer; but churches didn’t survive this long without being wily and clever.
It depends on their being no other legitimized messages coming through.
Right, and it’s telling that the state Democratic parties in these places are incompetent at best and not worth a bottle of warm spit.
And if you are not in the good graces of that network, you will be starved out of the community, if you’re lucky. That can be a good motivator to toe whatever line is considered acceptable.
Yep, and some folks from that bunch think they can excommunicate you by dropping you on Facebook. But Facebook shunning just doesn’t work when relatives and friends are not trapped in tiny towns.
The common thread is racism. Always racism. It poisons people’s minds. And since almost no one is willing to admit they are racist, conservatives who hate the federal government (because they see it as a medium to transfer money and power from white to brown people) adopt bizarre rhetorical arguments like Obamacare-is-totalitarian to avoid acknowledging their racism.
That’s the core of the Crazy. It always has been. Never forget that this country was founded on white supremacism, literally written into the most hallowed document of the nation.
Thankfully, through the efforts of millions of people of conscience the racist power has steadily weakened over the generations since the Civil War. And as a political force its death knell may have sounded in 2012. But it’s not gone yet and its death rattle is very, very loud.
One unintended effect of Obama’s election was to permit the re-emergence of open racism, as we have all seen in thousands of internet examples. And once this (very recent) cultural restraint had been seriously weakened, that certainly allowed the expression of a wide variety of irrational, fact-free, emotion-laden lunacy masquerading as political “argument” or “thought”.
It was a freeing of the “conservative” Id, the force which powers all forms of political reaction. It will not docilely accept repression again. Indeed, the evidence seems to show it is getting stronger and stronger….
I don’t particularly see what you’re baffled about. The rank and file are totally correct this is empty optics and that Boehner wants to cave because he knows it would disaster to push on the way the Tea Baggers want. Because what they want is so bad, they’ve been lied to and given the run around for years. Now they’ve finally managed to put enough of their own people in there where it’s gumming up the machine.
I’m pretty sure they firmly believe that they achieved what they did in spite of government not because of it. They remember all the times government kept them from doing what they wanted to do, not when their lives were made easier.
So too, the structure Dems had built has insulated them from some hardships.
Apparently this relatively recent phenomenon has given rise to the discovery of even deeper and darker black holes in the universe than heretofore ever imagined.
Once one has self-selected, or been indoctrinated as a young person, into the World of Conservatism, their daily life is the consumption of media garbage whose editorial goal is simply to fuel rage and anger against the demonic lib’rul movement.
One self selects into this movement mostly by learned hatred of the groups that make up the Dem party—Negroes, urban “elites”, Latinos, gays, enviro and femi-nazis, intellectuals, etc. “Conservatism” is not so much a political movement as an absolute refusal to associate with hated others—common class grounds be damned. Conservative propaganda spends much time making sure that the cogs know who makes up the hated Dems and Left.
Abortion had a lot to do with motivating the now heavily politicized churches, but that backlash obviously occurred quite some time ago. Perhaps the success the forced birthers have been having over the past decade has made total victory seem even closer and hence made their emotions even stronger. Victory breeds confidence.
To me it seems likely that “Conservatism” is like an addiction, a narcotic. Once you get addicted to the rage and outrage and spittle-flecked “Victim!!” mindset, you need more an more powerful doses to achieve the desired Conserva-high. And the plutocrats who create and manufacture hate-filled garbage like Boss Rushbo, Hanniturd and the rest of the 24/7 Noize Machine are happy to comply—rationality, responsibility, governance be damned. Profits over country.
So keep the addicts well supplied, that’s crucial. And if the stuff needs to be stronger and stronger, then so be it. Today’s bug-eyed Crazy is the natural result of the addiction process.
Would it matter if these rural and exurban and small city folks had access to alternate points of view? If the daily stream of conservative sewage they consume had to present opposing arguments? It would if there was still any rationality to be found in those poisoned brains, any semblance of good faith citizenship, any sense of proportion and compromise. Can these brains still function after decades of Rightwing sewage consumption? I have my doubts.
But one thing is for sure, these areas of the country with ever-more-crazed reps supplying their fixes are not being forced to confront contrary views in a systematic way. Diversity of thought appears not to exist.
If “what I tell you three times is true” (Lewis Carroll, Hunting of the Snark), just imagine the effect of being told the same bullshit 100,000 times. So yeah, the conservative propaganda machine is at least a very large slice of the explanation. (Some of the congresscritters themselves probably know better in their heart of hearts, but they are deathly afraid of primary challenges so they won’t say boo to their Fox-addled base).
The conservative echo chamber is destroying the country, and it will be very cold comfort when it ultimately destroys the Republican Party, as it will.
Alternative viewpoints can sink in. It just takes one time, where the BS is proved what it is, for the spell to break. It happened to me and many of my family, for different reasons. All lifelong “conservatives”and reliable republicans, now all but one brother are close to yellow dog democrat status.
The challenge I have talking politics with those around me is to avoid making the issues personal. They aren’t bad people, most of them, they just believe things that aren’t true or are to their own detriment. So I try to stick to facts, make reasoned and non-judgmental arguments, and sometimes it works. The way to guarantee failure is to call them racists or mean spirited, etc. They don’t believe they are, so accusing them of it just shuts their minds to anything that follows.
I’m hoping Obamacare will change some minds. It will be hard for many who are now uninsured, and who get GOOD insurance, to believe republicans who’ve told them it will be the end of the country that THEY have access to decent healthcare, many for the first time in their lives. I’m hoping that’s driving some of the desperation from the right wing to stop it before it ever gets started – they might know people will love it and there is no way for republicans to take ANY credit.
The challenge I have talking politics with those around me is to avoid making the issues personal. They aren’t bad people, most of them, they just believe things that aren’t true or are to their own detriment. So I try to stick to facts, make reasoned and non-judgmental arguments, and sometimes it works.
This applies to almost anything. Politics, religion and a host of other things for which people “feel” rather than “think” about rationally. And it is a lesson I am still trying to learn.
To the question:
It’s fairly simple, really. Have you ever heard the term “gene sink?” Probably not, because I coined it. Below is a post I made on Booman Tribune 7 years ago that pretty much sums it up. Long story short for the time-consumed modernos among us? Sure. Over the past 50 years or so the rural areas of our country…and most of the ethnic enclaves in cities as well, at least those with generally light enough skin hues to allow their residents to blend in elsewhere…have experienced a brain drain of epic proportions. Suburbs too, for at least 20 or 30 years. Several generations of the people who were raised in those areas…people w/real talents of one kind or another…have left home and moved closer to the cities. To where their talents can be used to their own profit. The ones left at home have reproduced with others who didn’t leave, and the end result over time is a lowering of the general quality of people who live there. It’s natural. It’s been happening for centuries, but the rate and concentration of change has…along with everything else in the modern world…accelerated beyond belief. Result? Fox News-watchers w/out a brain in their head. By the millions.
Gene sink at work.
The eventual outcome of this movement?
The tarpits of history, I believe…along with the whole wingnut movement. Sooner rather than later. So it goes. But fear not…the “smart” ones are pretty dumb, too. We’ll bumble along just as we have always bumbled along, us humans. Only a little quicker now. So that goes as well.
AG
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Is it this Gene Sink also makes them afraid of the future? They are almost like the Amish whose religion/ideology enables them to make today and tomorrow just like yesterday.
With any luck they will be so inbred, lethal mutations will be reducing their populations in no time at all?
May I see your research? Or are you just going by your “gut” intuition. And we all know how that works out.
You really should stick to music and let the scientists do science. You are swimming with the fishes and insisting you know what school they go to.
You’re going to be trotting out Social Darwinism next.
I am my own research…research that I trust well past the results of academic hustlers and inbred media talking heads. You like their results better? Go to it, Bugboy. The endgame of that lame shit will more resemble your blogname than anything else.
“Social Darwinism?”
I call it evolution. The evolution of the life of Life. Always forward. A step back, a couple of steps forwards, a night in some alley and then more progress.
Stick to music?
Music is life.
Bet on it.
The real thing always wins in the end.
Watch.
AG
Another thing to think about in documenting the ongoing Rise of the Crazy is the extent to which the Global Warming Denialist movement—led and funded by fossil fuel plutocrats—released the American Right from the basic rules of rationality.
By destroying and delegitimizing science and the clear implications of science, “conservatism” was able to open a Pandora’s box of political and economic lunacy. Once the nation’s NASA scientists could be openly mocked and disdained (even by senators), one really does not need to listen to say, economists, or sociologists or any of the other “elitist” experts who always point out that our current way(s) of operation can’t be sustained without calamity and that some actual sacrifices are necessary.
Because, at bottom, the “conservative” movement tells its cogs that everything they and the US are doing is great, no matter what the evidence, and that America has no real problems other than Big Gub’mint–coincidentally the last existing obstacle to total Corporate and plutocrat power. And that’s what not-too-bright people who don’t want to have to change anything want to hear.
based on my run for State Senate in 2012.
I ran on 2 things – education and a special slush fund for bidness. Surprising to me, not everyone agreed about education. Many believe that teachers are lazy and incompetent.
Why don’t people respect teachers? Why do they distrust educators?
I think that the Repukes have made a strong case for the basic Repukeliscum view of the world, the Lone Frontiersman view. In this view, you alone are the Master of Your Fate, the Captain of Your Ship. If you depend on others, you are Weak and Cowardly. You are supposed to be out in yer own cabin, shootin’ yer own Injuns, rapin’ yer own wimmens, and generally having self-sufficiency as your guiding light.
You know, the Ayn Rand thing.
Democrats have never explained why this is wrong. It’s not an easy case to be made, and we have pretty much given up trying to make it. So, it’s the individual against the corporation, the end of unions, the end of collectie action – you alone against the organized forces of corporate collectivism.
We on the left have not tried to make the case for collective action, and this is the key lack in today’s politics.
The disconnect is seeing the corporations, which are state-privileged legal entities, as “private”. And conflating corporate CEOs into that Lone Frontiersman BS. Folks who believe that stuff never have researched how their ancestors in the Northern Plains survived. Or how folks out in small towns of the Dakotas still do. For all the Lone Frontiersman BS, they depend on each other, even depend on each other to legitimate the Lone Frontiersman BS.
Boo, I don’t think it’s the noise machine alone. I think you can look back at least as far as the start of the Cold War to see milestones along the path that brought us to this point.
McCarthyism and commie-baiting in Congress and the media gave birth to a particular branch of parochial Americanism and us-versus-them divisions. Vietnam and the attendant student protests exacerbated the split. Roe v. Wade and less restrictive access to birth control helped rouse the sexophobes. The rise of televangelist culture and Jerry Falwell politics threw some fuel on the fire. Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich made careers out of exploiting conservative resentments. The Clinton impeachment and Bush v. Gore created a more activist and combative left.
Pile on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the NRA, and many other hot issues and you’re starting to get a fuller picture of how we got here.
It isn’t exactly new. See KKK, Henry Ford anti-Jewish rants and the leagues of followers, Know Nothings, Tent Revival fads, Father Coughlin, etc.
What I am startled by when I travel to those parts of the country are the questions and comments I get out of the blue in what I elsewhere would consider very inappropriate settings.
Like being asked in polite casual conversation, “So you must totally love Christie, right?”
Or, “What do you think about what’s going on in the country?” (Me: Huh?) “I mean the massive debt we are building up. It’s horrible don’t you think?”
It would seem that sort of social pressure makes it hard to disent and think openly and differently or even critically.
For many otherwise fine and caring people, it is.
I know it’s hard to imagine now, but it wasn’t always like this.
In the part of rural Oklahoma where I grew up in the fifties, it was a article of faith that FDR and the New Deal saved us from the Great Depression. And it was an article of faith that the New Deal and the CCC saved Oklahoma from the Dust Bowl. A lot of Okie farmers from my Grandad’s generation had a view of government that these days would almost qualify as Social Democrat.
Attitudes slowly began to change with the sixties and Civil Rights. A lot of rural Okies who were actually pretty progressive and populist economically were very conservative socially. They weren’t comfortable with the changes sweeping the country.
But TarheelDem has it exactly right. What really changed everything was the co-opting of the Southern Baptists and the rise of the Great White Hate Machine. Then we lost the Fairness Doctrine and money could monopolize the airwaves. Stir in Johnny-One-Note talk radio and Faux News and you get a giant feedback loop that reinforces itself and shuts out every other viewpoint.
When I was a kid, my Dad was a reasonable, thoughtful, well-read man. He taught me that there were always two sides to every story, and that it was my duty to listen carefully to both sides and make up my own mind. He passed into late middle age about the same time as Rush and others like him were taking over talk radio. Then as his health began to fail and he became more and more house-bound, he began to spend more and more time with the TV parked on Fox. And he turned into a full-fledged wingnut right before my eyes. In some ways, that was harder to deal with than the health issues that took him away from us.
And this is key. You listen to that crap, it convinces you. Who do the Dems have dishing out counter-propaganda? Nobody.
Exactly. If you don’t care about facts or evidence, you can make a simple, convincing argument full of buzz words and dog whistles that can be hard to resist. And if you hear it repeated over and over everywhere you go, it’s hard to not get sucked in.
And the issue of counter-propaganda is a hard one, at least for me. No doubt the right kind of spin-meisters could come up with equally convincing counter-arguments — if they were equally unconcerned with facts or evidence or truth. I imagine BooMan could hold his own in that kind of knife fight, if he didn’t have all those darned scruples getting in the way.
But do we really want to go there? Is it worth winning the argument if we have to become as dirty as the other side to do it? I admit I’m conflicted, but I don’t think it is. In a way it’s like another version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
And just to be clear, I’m not questioning your honesty or scruples, just trying to make the point.
Another factor is that conservative views benefit from being more reductive and simplistic. It’s so easy to talk about makers vs. takers. It’s much harder to talk about how all things are interconnected and that private property and enterprise have never and will never exist outside of a system of public goods and institutions which make them possible.
I grew up in a little run down railroad town town in upstate New York, where the people there are quite conservative in their views now. I can’t describe to you what it was like growing up in a small town but I now live in the suburban sprawl of South Florida and it’s most definitely not the same planet.
My hometown, even though it was just a 3-4 hour drive outside the “City”, it was far enough to give it a provincial feeling, like what happened in “the world” didn’t really effect what happened there. My work also took me to a tiny island community off the coast of Florida where I ran into the same community isolationist mentality.
A great deal of them are wrapped up in their daily routine, spend most of their time on family affairs, many of which are centered around church functions, and they go about their lives blissfully unaware of world events.
They simply don’t care about this stuff until it seriously offends them, and that is why they get so outraged. So they get some pet issue that really, really pisses them off, and it’s like a hobby for them. Couple that with Republicans being notoriously single issue voters.
BooMan,
Haven’t you noticed that there’s a black man, in the White House?
Obama’s election was the spark that’s caused this explosion of madness.
His reelection, was a further affront to their bigoted sensibilities – a black man got away with slapping white men – TWICE!
TWICE!
And no lynching!!!!!