So, do you forget Morton Downey, Jr.? 20 some years ago he had his own talk show and he’d scream at liberals, call them pablum puking scum. Of course when his show started to go downhill he carved a swastika in his forehead and claimed he’d been attacked by skinheads in an airport bathroom, and as a double whammy, his in your face chain smoking eventually killed him. And Rush…he’s not all that new, I remember right after Clinton took office, Rush had his own TV show, that he’d start every night with a graphic ala the ones they had during the Iran hostage crisis, where it would say, “America Held Hostage…Day xx”. Conservatives always scream the loudest, especially when they’re out of power…at least it has been the case in my adult life.
I’m biased, I’ll admit it, but it seems to me that much of what passes for current Conservative rhetoric is about fear. Conservatives are afraid that gay marriage will destroy the fabric of the institutions. Conservatives are afraid that the government is going to tax away all their hard earned money and give it to people who are lazy. Conservatives are afraid that illegal immigrants are going to come her and take all our jobs, overcrowd our hospitals, and spread diseases (and suck off the government teat, taking all their hard earned tax dollars). Conservatives are afraid that if we allow bad language and nudity to appear on television or in music lyrics it’s going to lead to the downfall of polite society. Conservatives are afraid if we teach anything other than abstinence based sex ed, our teens are going to get the idea that it’s OK to be promiscuous at a young age. These things make Conservatives not only afraid, but ANGRY….and they HAVE to do something about it.
Or that’s what it seems like on the surface. But really, Conservatism has become more and more about removing regulations from businesses and creating a full blown trickle down economy where businesses make all the decisions. And to be honest, most of these people who really want to see the rich continue to get richer and richer, the ones who want their taxes to be zero, and to operate under zero regulations of any kind…so that they can produce for almost no cost and sell for obscene profits…I’m firmly convinced that many Conservatives who are at heart true fiscal Conservatives/Libertarians/Anarchists at heart really couldn’t give two shits about some of these social issues, but since the days of Reagan when the Republican party first actively courted the “religious right” they’ve tied fiscal conservatism to social conservatism. Why? Because ANGER is what gets people to the polls. People rarely vote FOR someone they really like….most elections are about voting against the person you dislike the most. That’s why we have so many negative ads in an election campaign.
And unfortunately, that’s all the right has these days. Their social views may have been mainstream in the 80s when most people didn’t know a single openly gay person, for example…but now all this fear, which was based on a lack of familiarity, is just gone for many voters, so it doesn’t resonate…but the ones who still fear gays, you have to shout loud about how accepting them will destroy our nation to get the max number of the fearful to the polls. Their economic policies, which have had a stranglehold on the US for 28 years, where the idea was deregulate the top, let the money go to the rich first and they’ll create jobs with it, has failed utterly…the whole house of cards has FINALLY come down, and the only way they can resonate with people is to scare them against this HUGE government the liberals want to build so they can raise YOUR taxes and give the money to lazy people. That message just isn’t going to resonate with anyone but an angry, scared person. And Security, which was the 3rd leg in the Conservative platform…that message worked really good in the aftermath of 9/11, where you could invoke the phrase and people would be afraid that Dems couldn’t keep us safe the way Republicans could. Now people are waking up to the fact that Democrats were the ones who said that attacking Iraq would ultimately make us less safe because a decentralized Iraq would create a power vacuum that would be filled by Al Quaeda…and viola, Dems were right!
So basically, if the Republican party is to survive, and let’s face it, it’s still run by those who are used to the kind of world we were living in up till a couple years ago, they realize that they need to hold onto every last scared voter, so while they figure out what additional set of issues they need to align themselves with in order to become a viable national party again, they need to hold onto their base, and that means keeping them scared shitless by constantly screaminug about how the Dems are screwing them over. Truth be damned. Because let’s face it, fear is what wins elections…it has been since the days of Nixon…and remember that between Nixon’s first innauguration and Obama’s innauguration, Democrats had the White House for 12 years, Republicans for the other 28.
Liberals, and yes they are plenty of angry liberals, but most aren’t as “vocal” are ideologically about moving society forward in the direction they want it to go. Conservatives by nature do not want to change, they want to go with the if it ain’t broke don’t fix it mantra. So libs scream change, what’s going to motivate a conservative is to tell him why that propopsed change should be scary to everything he holds dear. Which is why Conservatives will always seem angrier…this past election just summarized it perfectly…it’s about hope vs. fear. Fear has just been a more powerful motivator for several decades now.
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