This is the best analysis of why the Conservative movement in the USA has withered as champion of individual freedoms, degenerated into lunacy, and, frankly, supported evil over the past ten or so years. It's time for all people who live in the reality-based world to fight back, not try to pacify them. As with Hitler (see, I'm using one of their straw-men!), appeasement does not help them accept reality, it only lengthens their leashes, and if a mad dog has a long-enough leash, it'll break free. Then how comfortable are you with granting them their crazy? One of the reasons the US Progressive movement has been so flaccid is that it's all about finding consensus, touchy-feely love-ins where we all get along. Guess what? Given the chance, those you're trying to appease will slap your "let's all get along" ass in Guantanamo.
It's also greatly reassuring to see that someone of Hari's mental caliber recognizes how the Republican's contemptible warping of religious faith is complicit in the corruption of Conservatism. "Faith-based reality" is not the real world, so it's easy to manipulate folks who blindly follow whatever they are told. It's disgusting.
Lj-cut here and there to shorten your F-list, so be sure to read the whole thing under the cut. Emphases are mine.The Republican Party Is Turning Into a CultBy Johann Hari in
the Huffington Post.
Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarized by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."
( Read more... )Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and - at the same time - that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.
These aren't fringe phenomena:
a Research 2000 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer." No amount of hard evidence - here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper - can pierce this conviction.
This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanize the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed - with a straight face - that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.
You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialized country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves - and just under 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result,
18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" - and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.
( Read more... )A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumor that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched somehow to include the disabled. It was flatly untrue - but the right had their talking point, Palin declared the system "downright evil", and they were off.
( Read more... )These claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine
US Investors' Daily claimed that
if Steven Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he
is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS." Frank Laffer, the right-wing economist lauded by David Cameron,
claimed on CNN that it would be a disaster if the government got its hands on Medicare, the program providing healthcare for the elderly, paid for entirely by... the government.
( Read more... )For many of the people at the top, this is mere cynical manipulation: one of Bush's former advisors, David Kuo, has
said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe it. They are being cruelly manipulated into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured - and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.
Indeed, if you spend any time with American right-wingers - as I have,
reporting undercover on events like the National Review cruise and the Christian Coalition Solidarity Tour of Israel - you soon find that your arguments don't center on philosophy. You have to concentrate on correcting basic factual errors about the real world.
( Read more... )How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" - which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" Australia exists, or fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.
Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has tried to conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has shamefully assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma." Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them. His healthcare plan is weaker and harder to explain as a result.
But this kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only by over-ruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people with the maddest fears. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."
However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarro-cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan should be - shrill, baby, shrill.
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