For some time now, whenever contemplating the political events of the day, I find myself wrestling with a troubling uncertainty. At any given moment, it's not entirely clear which group of politicians galls me more. On the one hand, we have the brazen and guiltlessly mendacious sociopaths who are setting the moral compass of the Republican Party, one on which true north is constituted by untrammeled predation and the tactics that enable it.
On the other hand, there are the Democrats, a party that seems more divided -- primarily between staggeringly feckless "liberals" who cower and retreat in the face of GOP attacks, and "moderate" corporate mercenaries of the "Blue Dog" contingent who aspire to nothing grander than being the Democratic Pepsi alternative to Republican Coke. But today, because GOP propaganda is winning hearts and minds among the ignorant and vulnerable, it is the party of Dick Armey, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin that vexes me the most.
As the recent lobbyist-choreographed, anti-health care, town hall lynch mobs have demonstrated, Republican leaders and right wing media demagogues will say anything to advance their interests and those of their moneyed sponsors. And, apparently, their constituents among the electorate will believe anything. No paranoid fantasy seems too bizarre, too implausible, or too disconnected from consensual reality to find a credulous audience among right wing true believers.
Some readers with a partisan bent other than my own might assert that the conservative base has no monopoly on paranoid thinking. And that would be true. The difference is that in left wing conspiracy theories, those leaders who are seen as constituting a plot usually have a public record of lethal and Machiavellian machinations, and an indifference to human "collateral damage."
Take the popular notion that the Bush II regime planned and executed the 9/11 attacks on their own. In my view, this seems quite unlikely, given that administration's combination of hubris, stupidity, and determined incompetence. Nevertheless, we know its members, individually and collectively, had a history of deception, ruthlessness, sadism, and a willingness to kill hundreds of thousands people to gratify their wet dreams of imperial conquest. Right wing paranoid delusions, on the other hand, seem much more like frank projections. For example, we already have "death panels;" they are run by health insurance companies and determine whether life-saving care will be paid for.
It is not especially hard to figure out why GOP politicians and pundits would make up whatever fictions might enhance their economic and political well being. But it is not so self-evident why middle and under class conservative voters would so eagerly, and at the moment, deliriously, swallow the delusional confections offered up by their cynical and amoral leaders. A provocative but largely ignored recent article in the New York Times might provide a clue.
Nearly all of the states in which it is legal for school authorities to inflict corporal punishment on children are in the South. According to a study jointly authored by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, not only is it acceptable to hit students in these Republican strongholds but disabled children receive a disproportionate amount of the beatings. A principle at one school explained, "I was whipped as a child, so it's fine with me." The article describes the physical punishment of a 6-year old autistic boy, who was spanked with an inch-thick wooden paddle wielded by a 300-pound assistant principle. "It just devastated him," the boy's grandmother recalled.
OK, so folks in red states like to "discipline" children by raising welts on their buttocks, and find the derrières of the disabled a particularly tempting target. What does that tell us about politics other than confirming what we already know about the sadism of conservatives, their contempt for the vulnerable, and their absence of empathy? Well, as it turns out, not only does a right wing ideology justify and facilitate spanking, but also spanking helps to create future right wing ideologues.
Two University of Massachusetts research psychologists, Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, studied the developmental impact of authoritarian and physically punitive parenting, and described the results in their book, The Politics of Denial. Controlling for the known effects of education and income, they found that a history of this sort of childrearing predicted conservative political attitudes in adulthood. If we attend to the affective register of Republican "street" politics (however fueled by K Street), it is obviously driven by fury, vengeance, and a sense that a malevolent authority whose responsibility is to care for them is really out to humiliate, hurt and destroy those who are dependent on its ministrations. No wonder GOP propagandists, like Frank Luntz, have gotten such a high political yield out of conjuring up the evil parental bogey of "Big Government."
To be clear, I am not making a reductionist argument. Obviously, there are numerous interacting factors -- psychological, economic, and sociological -- that contribute to the adoption of conservative values and ideas. A history of harsh childhood punishment that includes spanking is only one. But there's a well-known public figure whose history is quite illustrative in this regard.
Occasionally right wing pundits tell more truth than they might have intended. Michael Savage, the bigoted, shrieking rage-monger of ultra-conservative talk radio, offered up a moment of rare if still rationalizing candor in his 2003 book. In a passage that referenced his childhood, he said, "Things were tough every day of our lives. And we made the best of it. Frankly, that's why I'm driven the way I am. I was raised on neglect, anger, and hate. I was raised the old-fashioned way."
In another interview, following his usual rant against "turd-world immigration," "left-wing pinko vermin in high places," and the uppity women of the "she-ocracy," he warns his readers, "Only a more savage nation can survive -- not a more compassionate nation." It seems the only way he could survive, when in the late 1980s he shifted his identity from an ambivalent North Beach bohemian to a reborn conservative, was to change his last name from Weiner (pronounced whiner) to Savage. If you accept power as a zero-sum game -- which is the Republican world-view, and one that parental violence makes quite persuasive -- it's better to be a perpetrator than a victim.
One of the frothing town hall brown shirts, Scott Oskay, tweeted to his comrades last week that they should bring their guns, and that if anyone from ACORN or SEIU attended the gatherings, "...stop being peaceful, and hurt them. Badly." With this sort of fascist thuggery being stage-managed and celebrated by the party of punishment, and dutifully enacted by its wounded and gullible flock, can a revived militia movement and more Oklahoma City cataclysms be far behind? If the Democrats, especially Obama, can't tap some hitherto undiscovered well of passion and courage, and learn to create narratives more compelling than the right wing's grim fairy tales about government-mandated euthanasia, the past will have been our ominous prologue.