Ryan brain showing missing area that governs ability to tell the truth
Now we come to the 3rd, and final part (Hey, I heard that; who said “Thank God”?) Of our trilogy on the twisted minds of political/social conservatives. Indeed, this is not the end of the matter, as they seem unwilling to go away. But hopefully with a better understanding of what we are dealing with, which I regard as somewhat of a mass delusion of nasty intentions, those of us who value reason, reality, tolerance, and humanism, might yet get a reasonable chance to give the better sides of our perplexing nature an opportunity for fuller expression. Okay, that’s a bit preachy, so let’s get back to our subject, those with . . .
Dual-ish Minds
Conservatives tend to see things in a sort of narrative, almost fairytale, fashion. For example, they often portray America as “God’s country,” as exceptional to history, having it’s own special place above and apart from other nations, as being morally superior, and such. This also fits with, and is often conflated with, religious narratives that anticipate an End Times, involving some great final conflict between good and evil (viz. capitalism vs. communism, Christianity vs Islam, straight vs gay). They usually see things in black and white (black= bad, white= good). I hardly need elaborate upon the marriage of conservative politics and fundamentalist vision that has been forged on the political right since the 1970s and finds its most profound expression in its degenerate bastard child, the Tea Party.
Another dimension of the narrative imagination of conservatives is the falsification of its own history. For example, conservatives love to refer to their beloved St. Ronald as an exemplar of their kind. In fact, although Reagan referred to himself as a conservative he was one far closer to the political center than today’s versions. He raised taxes several times, grew government debt the highest it had ever been, clearly violated the Constitution with his Iran-Contra shenanigans, and was hardly a religious sort of guy. In fact, it has been argued that “Dutch,” as a friend of mine likes to call him, was farm more similar to Barack Obama than to George W. Bush. And speaking of (the now rarely spoken of by Republicans) George W. Bush, even he might not fit the increasingly extreme mold of contemporary Republican reactionary conservatives.
This capacity to bowdlerize, indeed falsify and fantasize history, as we shall see, is not a difficult thing to do in the conservative turn of mind where actual truth has a very low value and even “fact-checkers” are denigrated as some sort of leftist conspiracy of veracity. However, the greater dangers in this set of mind is that it creates a capacity to maintain a cognitive dissonance that—and this is indeed an expression if the twisted mind—enables conservatives to maintain (even when confronted with the contradictions) a capacity to hold something to be, and not be, at the same time. This is, of course a violation of the first tenet of philosophy, and a precursor to madness in the individual personality and in societies the antecedent to eventual disintegration.
Rape the Government
First, although their rhetoric expresses outright disdain for government, the RCRR doesn’t really want to kill the government; they just want to be able to dominate it the way they want to dominate women, for which they also have their uses. And like Mitt does with this leveraged buy-outs, they can buy out the government and run it to suit their interests, giving the Values Yahoos in steerage, their draconian American Taliban, such inane ideological handouts as: zygotes are people, God in schools, and forced vaginal probes, while they feed their greed with no taxes and no regulations. This is what coalesces the Romney 1–per centers, and his billionaire buddy supporters, will with the extreme right wing political bottom feeders––the rich get richer, and the stupid get their Pyrrhic values victories that undergird their delusional religio-political narratives. It is, as the Romney campaign is showing it to be, a shaky coalition that might not be able to be translated into electoral success.
Government is also useful to conservative entrepreneurial enterprises. They even have a name for it––privatization. It’s buttressed by the argument that private enterprise and always do things better and government. It is a specious and empirically unsupportable argument, but it has been used to “outsource” lot of government jobs to corporations. The two most egregious areas have been in defense and education, two areas where government as historically had enormous amounts of expenditure. Not only does the defense side funnel huge chunks of the national budget to defense contractors, but as we have seen in the case of both the Iraq and Afghan wars, contractors and those conflicts have raked in tons of money. These expensive “shadow armies” of Blackwater and Halliburton, among others are in fact more wasteful. The argument for privatization of education––read here charter schools––is equally unsupportable, buttressed by all-out attacks on the public schools and public teachers. But, there is money to be made here, and by cherry picking the student population, being careful to avoid students that are more expensive to educate because of their poverty and problems, and then reducing educational success to easily manipulated test scores that allows such schools to claim they are more successful. Fiscal restraint has devolved from “kill the government” to turn everything over to corporate profiteering.
Corrupt the Process
Although there had been Nixon’s “dirty tricks” and Reagan’s “October Surprise” stab in Carter’s back, the outright theft of Bush v Gore and the rigging of votes in Ohio in 2004 convinced Republicans that even the most blatant lying, cheating and stealing suited their aims. The Citizens United decision made it possible to further elevate the power of the rich and the corporations and hide it under a cloak of sanctioned secrecy. The next step was to attempt to rig the election process with the restrictive exclusionary measures.
The Voter Fraud Fraud. This national effort to rig the 2012 election is being carried out on the country’s voting system by Republican controlled state election authorities on the pretext that of a fabricated threat of widespread “voter fraud.” In fact, there is no significant voter fraud—anywhere. Astonishingly, this outright robbery—by requiring onerous ID, or purging voter roles on other pretexts–of the political rights of predominantly minorities in districts where they can tip results to Democrats is being carried out in broad daylight while the Roberts court sits on its ass and does nothing.
Republican control of state governorships and state houses in several states after the 2010 Tea Party influenced elections that resulted in ultra-conservative legislative audacity hasn’t stopped at myths about the election process. By creation a huge fiction that the problems of local governments are not due to the economic meltdown and fiscal—no tax increase ever, for anything pledges—parsimony, Republicans have been on a rampage to extend their authority. Perhaps the most egregious of these has been the Michigan governor Rick Snyder’s authorization of emergency financial manager law allows the state government to take over local governments and suspend locally democratically- elected officials. While it must be acknowledged that municipal incorporations are “creatures” of the state, so to must it be said that the conservative mouthpieces for local autonomy, democracy and the evils of big government are nothing more than opportunist hypocrites. Such practices owe to the influence of operations such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is a nationwide cabal of elected state legislators colluding with some of America’s most powerful corporations. Their mission is to remake America by changing its laws one state at a time. ALEC creates so-called “model legislation,” pro-corporate laws, close to a thousand bills, based at least in part on its models, that are introduced every year. An average of 200 pass and are enacted. It is a consortium of shadow governments that has been active for decades, but managed to remain below the radar, until the Treyvon Martin case in Florida. ALEC has been influential in getting “stand your ground” gun legislation in states where the average IQ is equivalent to the clip in an AK-47.
The War on Reason and Truth
Now we come to what is fundamentally “twisted” with these conservative fundamentalists: they are philosophically wedded to insidious principle that the end justifies the means. Essentially, that philosophy enables lying and denying.
It is the philosophy that allows Tod Akin to lie about the biology of raped women.
It is the philosophy that enables them to pander to the religious fundamentalists in their base by pushing for the destruction of the wall between church and state.
It is the philosophy that fosters the denial of climate change and global warming.
It is the philosophy that undergirds the false pretexts of the wars they initiated and debt-financed “off the books.”
It is the same philosophy that perpetuates the myth of “trickle-down” economics, that sundered the thin regulatory protections against Wall Street machinations, and that perpetuates the falsehoods that refer to the social safety net as “entitlements.”
It is the same philosophy that masks the racism behind the legitimacy of the president of the United States as a reasonable constitutional concern.
Thje False Equivalency. Moreover, if you happen to share these grievances, and if you happen to, as I have, put them to social/political Conservatives, you are likely to encounter another element of their war on reason and truth. Where likely to encounter their invoking of the false equivalency. Unconcerned with, were alright disdainful, of facts, they will retreat into yet another falsehood, accusing Democrats, Progressives, Liberals of same or equal malfeasances. This is merely an attempt––in addition to being an admission on their part––to deflect reasonable consideration of the facts, and pursuit of the truth, into the bogus rhetorical cloud of blame that “they all do it.” This is merely an attempt to justify their own notion at the end justifies the means, by accusing the opposition of doing the same.
That form of arghumentation simply does not survive the tests of empirics or logic. It is a rhetorical tool of the same philosophy that promotes and relies upon the ignorance and stupidity it’s political base. They need only to twist enough minds to their perverted war on reason and truth and their contorted resort to the false equivalency fashion a political base on a foundation of credulity, ignorance, and outright stupidity.
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© 2012, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.3.2012)