Follow The Leaders

I don't know if you have noticed, but something truly ugly seems to be bubbling up from the primordial ooze of the conservative movement. Here are a handful of greatest hits from just the last couple of weeks:

• Limbaugh calls veterans who are critics of the war "phony soldiers" and implies that one of them, who suffered a head injury, was a suicide bomber who was too damaged to know what he was doing.
• The right wing blogosphere and the Senate minority leader's office conspire to disseminate slander to the media about a lower middle class family because they spoke out about their support for a government program that provides health insurance for kids.
• Ann Coulter lets her bigotry show in a particularly ugly way on television by bluntly baiting her Jewish host saying that she believes Jews need to be "perfected".
• I got several handwritten and nicely typed letters to my post office box recently suggesting that I am a communist, a traitor and a very, very stupid person. (That's translated from the original Martian.)
• Last week CAF received this lovely screed:

"You pathetic socialist pukes give me hope that one day the country will reach the frustration level necessary to take up arms and hunt you assholes down. I went to Viet Nam to kill communist and will kill them here if necessary. I can still part your idiotic hair with an M-16 at about 300 yards and I would find great satisfaction in having people like you in my sights... the time of tolerating you assholes is running out....so please keep it up...and a mountain is going to come down on your treasonous head and if there is a hell, it is reserved for stupid fucks like the writers and contributers to assholes like you..... I detest you...I am your enemy and WILL REMAIN your enemy....quit talking about the military...they consider you their enemy, and you don't deserve a military.... All you have is the trashcanisthan of the northeast...the fucking rust belt, and the third world of California.... you ain't got shit! You will lose again, and again and again, because your message is socialist bile....and that is ALL you are.... FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!"

Boy, somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning, didn't he?

Clearly, people on the right are very, very angry right now and they are lashing out at their most hated enemies: Americans who disagree with them. The question is, why are they suddenly ratcheting up the rhetoric?

Dave Neiwert has been tracking this stuff for ages and would say that this is the result of the right's long standing tactic of injecting their most extreme rhetoric into the mainstream. I don't doubt that this is true. Limbaugh and Coulter are both toxic purveyors of eliminationist slime. It's just working its way up through the muck into the light.

Another interesting theory rests on the idea that a good portion of America is basically made up of spiteful, angry people who vote and think purely on the basis of making others miserable:

This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really's and uh-huhs to show that they're listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.

[...]

Put your ear to the ground in this country, and you'll hear the toxic spite churning. It's partly the result of commercial propaganda and sexual desperation—a desperation far more common than is admitted. If you didn't know anything about how America's propaganda worked, you'd think that every citizen here experienced four-dimensional multiple orgasms with beautiful, creative, equally satisfied partners, morning, noon and night.

The wretched truth is that America is an erogenous no man's land. Most white males here (at least the straight ones) have either dismal sex lives or no sex lives at all. As bad as this hurts, the pain is compounded every time you expose yourself to the cultural lies that await you at every turn—that is, every waking hour and during deep REM sleep, when the subliminal messages kick in. This wretchedness leads to a desire for vengeance, to externalize the inner famine—it leads directly to the Republican camp.

That's an entertaining concept, if nothing else, which is more prosaically presented in books like Stephen Ducat's The Wimp Factor and Susan Faludi's new book The Terror Dream. I have been writing about this thesis for years and I agree that, on some level, it absolutely contributes to the modern conservative worldview. The right wing male panic of the last several decades of rapid social change has certainly led to some very disturbed people (of both genders, by the way.)

But this is something that goes deeper than social anxiety. It's primal. There have even been studies recently that show that liberal and conservative brains work differently, and in ways that logically lead to a more violent and angry sort of thinking:

The differences between liberals and conservatives may run deeper than how they feel about welfare reform or the progress of the Iraq war: Researchers reported Sunday that their brains may actually work differently.

In a study likely to raise the hackles of some conservatives, scientists at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles, found that a specific region of the brain's cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives.

The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual response would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking.

"Say you drive home from work the same way every day, but one day there's a detour and you need to override your autopilot," said NYU psychologist David Amodio. "Most people function just fine. But there's a little variability in how sensitive people are to the cue that they need to change their current course."

The work, to be reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, grew out of decades of previous research suggesting that political orientation is linked to certain personality traits or styles of thinking. A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences. Some of the traits associated with conservatives in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression and tolerance of inequality.

That evoked outrage from conservative pundits.

(Heh.)

While that strikes me a persuasive, I don't think that adequately explains why this seems to be happening more at this moment. It's possible that it's a result of frustration with the fact that conservatives have been shown to be dramatically incompetent at governance. But they have always believed themselves to be an aggrieved minority bravely fighting against the liberal elites who run everything, so that doesn't really hold water either. And in any case, they will purge the Bushmen from their pantheon and instantly assume the glorious mantle of Ronald Reagan the first chance they get and carry on as if it never happened. (You can already see it with the astonishing hypocrisy with which they are once again extolling themselves as good fiscal stewards after six years of feeding on the government carcass like gluttonous hyenas.) These little set-backs do not penetrate the right wing mind very deeply.

But there is one thing that is new in the political landscape that might explain this recent outbreak of nasty invective: political leadership that is not only tolerant of its supporters reliance on violence, both real and rhetorical, but one that engages in it itself. We are led, after all, by a president who started an illegal war based upon lies and who blatantly uses fear and threats for political gain. He says "you're either with us or against us" and he hasn't hesitated to support and commend Republicans who use the same language against their political rivals.

And last week, among all these instances of violent right wing rhetoric flying through the ether, our president smirked, for the umpteenth time, "we don't torture" knowing very well that the whole point of his refusing to define torture is because they want people to believe they are actually torturing. Torture --- a taboo for centuries --- is now considered a useful tool by the government of the United States of America, both in practice and in rhetoric.

Our extremely powerful vice president blithely tells an interviewer that the medieval practice of water-boarding is a "no-brainer." The presidents lawyer famously wrote that the Geneva Conventions were quaint. The administration could barely find its voice to repudiate the horrors of Abu Graib and even then blamed it on a few bad apples when there was ample evidence that it, and the many other instances of prisoner mistreatment and torture we've seen revealed, are aspects of a widely used regime of experimental, ad-hoc "interrogation" methods based upon Soviet techniques. Rush Limbaugh comparing it to a fraternity prank was a thoroughly mainstream opinion among Republicans --- one allegedly moderate congressman even said that it wasn't torture at all, but rather a "sex ring."

And many members of the leadership of this country, in all branches of government, have signed off on the presidents right to order torture and indefinite detention with no due process for "enemies" however he sees fit. We know that the administration "renders" people to foreign countries for torture. They admit doing it, although they laughably claim that it is done "responsibly."

Why wouldn't the hard core right ratchet up its natural proclivity for violent rhetoric in light of that? Clearly, this kind of thinking is now openly sanctioned by the conservative leadership of this country.

The question for the rest of us is whether they will be content with only emulating their words. It wasn't that long ago that, under the influence of much less authoritative extremist rhetoric, a couple of radical right wingers took matters into their own hands. It's not as if it can't happen here.

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Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future