(This is a re-post from another thread which seems apropos here. I strongly urge you to view the video clips, if you haven’t seen them already. They tell a big part of the story. This is fascism on the march. This is what it looks like before they start dressing in brown shirts. )
I saw Dan Rather being interviewed by Rachael Maddow the other night and he said that he hadn’t seen this country as polarized and angry as it is now since the Vietnam War, and I am inclined to agree. I think that the Right has become so extreme, and so opposed to even the idea of government, that the only thing it can do should it ever seize power (say, through unlimited corporate spending on elections) is to demonstrate just how government in general, and democracy in particular, can be.
Indeed, when you venture outside the civility of Fluther into unmoderated political forums and ask people what they think they owe their fellow man, a large percentage of them say, “Nothing.” Not kindness, not civility, and especially not any kind of material aid.
One would think that people nowadays spring fully-grown from the brain of the Internet, entirely self-made—unaided and untutored by any other human being, and utterly bereft of the milk of human kindness. The lack of empathy and even common decency one encounters from ordinary folks on the Right can be quite chilling and disturbing.
Here, for example, Tea Partiers mock and scorn a man who has Parkinson’s Disease. Here Town hall shouters heckle woman in wheel chair pleading for her life-saving medication. Here Tea Partiers heckle a woman whose daughter-in-law died because she didn’t have health insurance. Here Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin mock 11-year old Marcelas Owens after he spoke about losing his mother due to lack of health insurance. Here is another attack on 12-year old boy who was injured in a car crash. And here a totally distraught woman pleading for care for her recently brain injured husband is met with a stunning lack of concern.
There is a kind of tone-deafness on the Right to people’s pain—and a kind of virulent shoot-the-messenger hatred toward anyone who would seek to remind them of what rationality, natural rights, human dignity and the Golden Rule would entail when applied to human governance.
It is no longer possible to have a political debate with the rights where facts, logic and truth matter. The “debates” we were having in about health care should make it absolutely clear that the Right was never interested in getting to the truth of the matter, finding common ground, or simply hashing out an honest difference of opinion. Rather, what we have been hostage to this whole time one side having a collective nervous breakdown. Facts have been replaced by slogans and sound bytes. Arguments have been replaced with ideological catch phrases and talking points. Good faith has given way to spin, and spin to outright lying.
We no longer seem to debate actual policy debates, we bicker over who is a socialist, an “elite,” or whether our worst fears are coming to pass. These feed into paranoid narratives, demonized opponents and end-of-days scenarios. The purpose public political forum are no longer to have a civil political discourse, but to shut down political discourse—and in so doing, so disgust people with their fellow citizen that they give up on democracy.
The point is to inspire mutual contempt. In one discussion I was observing, someone made a comment to the effect that he didn’t think everyone deserved health care. To which someone replied, “You must have contempt for humanity.” To which he responded, “No, just you!”
It hit me like a punch in the gut. The comment wasn’t directed at me, but seeing someone else gratuitously abused like that upset me almost as much as if it had been me. My first impulse was to figuratively reach through the screen and smack the living snot out of that person, but I realized that would have only escalated the situation and debased everyone who was touched by the ripples of incivility that would have followed.
Ever since Fox News got into the propaganda business, the nation’s political discourse has descended rapidly into the fevered swamps of paranoia and spiritual rot. Not surprisingly, the concept of human solidarity is almost alien to the American political discourse. We no longer see one another as proud members of the same great community, pulling together because we are all part of the same enterprise.
Instead, the Right refuses to accept the outcome of the last election and get on with the task of governing the country. It spends its time demonizing the country’s leaders, and treating their attempts to govern as if they were forms of treason. We have seen a mistrust of government grow into a full-blown hatred of government, as if the United States was uniquely incompetent at government among all the countries in the world.
Somehow we have allowed the Right to talk us into believing that we are under no obligation to help people we don’t like. Indeed, the Right feels particularly resentful at the government forcing them to contribute people and causes which they regard as “charity.”
As with the heckled man with Parkinson’ cited above, they are furious that the government wants more from them than they feel willing to give (although if their private generosity were sufficient, the man wouldn’t be protesting). And, it infuriates them no end to feel forced to give charity to people they feel are “undeserving” or whom they don’t regard as “real Americans.”
However solidarity is not an act of charity but an act of unity between citizens, equals and allies. Personally, I might not have any particular interest in the city’s multi-million dollar sports arena, and you might not have any particular interest in the offerings of the local PBS station, but I go along with your brand of entertainment and you go along with mine, and we both come out ahead. For a nominal personal contribution, we gain a sense of community spirit and pride, not to mention a stadium that can be used for generations. Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating to those who receive it, and reinforces unequal power relations.
The framing of questions in order to incite bickering, recrimination and contempt is a time-honored technique of divide and rule. Any attempt to enforce even a nominal level of civility is reviled as “political correctness.” Any attempt to address the many historical grievances that make us hate one another so, is dismissed as “whining” as if there never were any injustices, only selfish people trying to get something for nothing by complaining over things in the past that have been blown out of proportion.
When I first read about a group on the Far Right proposing to “re-translate” the Bible in order to airbrush out the “liberal” empathy, compassion and the social justice parts, I thought it was a joke. Likewise, during Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing, when the Republican Senators opined that “empathy” was a liberal code word and were upset that empathy might be an undesirable quality in a judge, I began to realize that they weren’t kidding. And, now that Glenn Beck is urging his followers to leave their churches if they advocate social justice, community,” “collective responsibility,” “respect for diversity,” or a “truly democratic society,” it has become undeniable that something spiritually unwholesome and deeply unChristian is metastasizing on the Right.
So, when they come at you with their bad faith arguments, their made up facts, their sly digs, their contemptuous needling insults and snarky zingers, they are essentially shutting any substantive discussion down, and attempting to get you to respond in kind. Once they get you to lose your temper and lure you over to their rhetorical dark side, it tends to confirm what they believe all along; namely, that people are selfish, unfeeling and mean, and therefore deserving of nothing.
If they are not decisively defeated at the polls in November I fear that nothing short of civil war will bring them back to good faith bargaining.
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