Your reaction to my first post really blew me away! I just want to thank all of you for being so awesome. I want to write a series of these, describing my ideas about how these movements arise, how we can understand them and how we can, hopefully, begin to beat them.
After the debate in Denver, my Republican friend messaged me. (I’m gonna call him Bob.) He starts trying to get into it with me, so I tell him what I think about it. (I’ve done a bit of debate. I thought plenty, but that’s not for this article.) Bob tells me, that Romney was never in favor of cutting taxes. And now it's "on the record,” so he believes it’s a promise. He tells me that Romney was never talking about a $5 Trillion tax cut, but a $5 Trillion revenue increase, and that it just got Obama "confused." Bob now totally buys all of the new lines, no matter how far they were from his previous beliefs (which he also quite fervently defended).
So, I’m going to ask a simple question, what is a Republican? I’ll wait a second, try to answer it. Keep your answer to yourselves. No shouting. But, don’t just picture some images. I mean, really, define the standard beliefs of the Republican, in words, without using the word “conservative” or any other synonyms. It’s not so simple, is it? This question is the heart of my project here. Republicans are not simple creatures. (Neither are Democrats, but I assume most of you know that already.)
kamarvt tried to answer the question, at least in part, last time in a comment, “I am wondering why the diarist [that's me!] dismisses the idea that sociopathy is rampant in the right wing.” In general, I reject this because it’s incorrect. Mental illness does not cause this ideology (at least not writ large, I have to give some credence to the fact that some of them must be, but not any significant numbers). 53% of Americans are not sociopaths. 25% of Americans are not sociopaths. This is not only depressing, this is not only a thought that prevents us from thinking ourselves capable of reaching out to them. But, this reifies the political opposition, and it is simply wrong. The cause of the sociopathic like symptoms is the mentality of war.
But, we can’t get ahead of ourselves, not quite yet. My general project is to understand the mentality of the far right. The mentality of people like Bob. Not all Republicans are crazy. But the crazy Republicans seem to be far louder than most of the others. This is no coincidence. This is the very heart of the matter. In order to undertake this, we have to step back a bit.
At the most simple level, a Republican is a member of the party that is in opposition to the Democrats, and who is not named Ralph Nader. There is some kind of ideological opposition between the parties. It’s not really all that easy to define what those ideologies are, you can describe them in some very nice words. But, at the end of the day, if we had to describe it to the little green men, if they ever come down, we’d be at a bit of a loss to really describe it to someone who hasn’t lived it.
(Keep that in mind until after the jump!)