On Republican Rage and Ugliness

I highly recommend this piece that appeared on TPM Cafe yesterday and discusses the Republican's love affair with "blind, vitriolic, raging, unhinged fury."  I think it touches on something fundamental that I've often felt, but not always been able to articulate.  Although there was plenty of ugliness in the world of conservatives in the Post World War II period, whether it be McCarthyism, the flirting with segregationists by both Goldwater and Nixon, the manipulation of cultural resentments by Nixon, Reagan and Bush the elder -- there has been something qualitatively different about post Bill Clinton Republicans.  They have been reflexively vicious, in a systematic and disproportionate way for the last sixteen years.  The fury at Clinton was always baffling in many ways, because of his innate moderation, his instinct for the middle ground, and his ideological flexibility, his comfort with business interests -- it always seemed like a form of calculated insanity that he, of all people, was the focus of this abject, foaming at the mouth kind of hatred.

It has, however, become the GOP's stock in trade, as the party that once boasted the likes of Rockefeller, Brooke, Javitz, and Hatfield, became the party of Limbaugh, Coulter, Delay, and Fox News.  The hatred has grown to the point of being an all out assault on empiricism and objective reality, everything being simply a jumping off point for propaganda, for the pressing of perceived electoral advantage -- but only within the framework of the "base."  The base would need to be continuously aroused against the "other" and this would be enough to run 51-49 nation, so long as party discipline remained ironclad. 

Not surprisingly, the party that has relied for so long on cultural revanchists as both its shock troops and base lacks the ability to embrace those who are different in order to insure its electoral viability in the future.  Thus, the sequential demonization of blacks, gays, Hispanics, Arabs and Muslims -- and now apparently, those of us who live on the coasts and boast college degrees or triple digit IQs -- for seeming electoral advantage is coming back to bite the Republicans in the ass.

As a result John McCain finds himself alternately pandering to the worst that America has to offer, while having to act shocked when his supporters use "Arab" as a self-evident epithet, when bilious shouts of "traitor" fill the halls, when an accomplished man with an inspiring story like Barack Obama is treated as a threat to the very existence of the Republic.  And thus begins the recoiling of those Republicans who maintain at least a vestigial affection for knowledge and culture, for reasoned debate and civil discourse, while their party hurtles headlong into a cul de sac of racial, ethnic and religious exclusion, a world filled with fear, bafflement, and a kind of undifferentiated rage at the changes all around.

I assume that it is self-evident that none of this appeals to America's many different minorities, who by the day become a bigger share of the electorate.  But it is also incredibly off-putting to young white Americans, many, if not most, of whom have grown up in a culture of diversity and tolerance, who find places like San Francisco and New York, Austin and Boston, Portland and Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle, Washington and Denver to be desirable, exciting, and congenial, rather than foreign and frightening.  They do not and will not identify with the smoldering, small resentments that seem to form the curdled consciousness of the Fox demographic.  This time around the reactionaries have made a seriously bad bet -- this election is just the beginning of their undoing.               

Comments

[Toast]

I love you, Chuck. And it's not just the wine talking. Really.

[litbrit]

This time around the reactionaries have made a seriously bad bet -- this election is just the beginning of their undoing.

From your lips to God's ear, C. Superb post. And I'm only one glass of bubbly into the celebrating. (Hi, Toast!)

[oddjob]

and now apparently, those of us who live on the coasts and boast college degrees or triple digit IQs

Umm, "now apparently"? That's been part & parcel of it from the beginning as well! Go look up info. on the McCarthy era and you'll find the very same sneering about the intelligentsia you find now. By the way, it isn't discussed much, but Dick Nixon made his way to prominence by exploiting the same red baiting McCarthy did, and during the same time. If you go check out Agnew's railings during the late 60's and early 70's you'll again see the same sneering about the Coasts and their intellectual elites.

[Stephen]

Hey, us hard-working Real Americans in the Heartland have triple-digit IQs too, you know. Wait, does it count if we put a zero at the front?

(Stephen nonchalantly hides his BA and M.Div diplomas in a drawer. . .)

[Sir Charles]

I love you all too.

You'll be surprised to know that I just got back from watching the U.S. National Soccer Team play Cuba -- and I rooted for the U.S.

(I could not, however, join the chants of U.S.A., U.S.A. - the Rethugs have just made that a viscerally ugly experience for me.

Stephen,

Why does anyone need an M.Div -- you just need to read the good book -- it's all there in the King's English like God intended.

[low-tech cyclist]

Go look up info. on the McCarthy era and you'll find the very same sneering about the intelligentsia you find now.

Indeed! I've been hearing GOP sneers at "the so-called intelligentsia" as long as I can remember. Oh yeah, and "bleeding-heart" liberals.

I'd rather be a member of the intelligentsia than a member of the dumbsia. And better a bleeding heart than no heart.

[litbrit]

I'd rather be a member of the intelligentsia than a member of the dumbsia. And better a bleeding heart than no heart.

*applauds*

ltc, I do believe you've given us another addition to the Cogblog Internet Traditions Collection: dumbsia.

More priceless gems from the dumbsia, ah, whattyagonnado... Me likey. :-)

[Stephen]

Why does anyone need an M.Div

Sigh. That's such a distressingly good question.

[MR Bill]

Just try using a BA in Humanities.

I dare you.

[Sir Charles]

Stephen and MR Bill,

Both are excellent credentials.

For going to law school.