Not Exactly the Better Angels of Our Nature

Headline on the New York Times website: “Global Markets Dive in Relentless Selloff.” A British news site says this is Freefall Friday. By 9:30 this morning the NYSE was down more than 460 points.

On the plus side, nobody’s complaining about the “angry Left” any more.

Adding to the links in the last post — at the Washington Post, Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. write “Anger Is Crowd’s Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally.” Anger my ass; this is white-hot rage. See also “Panic attacks: Voters unload at GOP rallies” by Jonathan Martin and “Is Negative Rhetoric a License to Taunt?” by Russell Goldman.

Steve M asks if the Right really is more deranged than during past elections. In many ways, no. But in some ways, yes.

The difference now is that, in the past, they were winners. This is not just in the sense of winning elections. I believe in recent years they felt some sense of power, of control, especially with George Bush in the White House.

How many times have we observed that the only thing holding the conservative coalition together was resentment — of liberals, of intellectuals, of Europeans, of anything that picked the scab off their inner insecurities? For a time, George Bush gave them the upper hand. He was their middle finger by proxy, extended to the rest of the world.

However, now it’s starting to dawn on them that they are losing. This could get dangerous. Think cornered, wounded animal.

It’s gotten so bad that even David Brooks is beginning to catch on. In the past several years “Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare,” he writes.

And for how many years have we progressives been saying that? But whenever we brought it up, we were told we were the ones trying to play “class warfare.” Brooks continues,

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

The Right has been running against the mythical “liberal elite” for a lot longer than 15 years. You might remember Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, that documents disdain for the educated class as a whole going back to the colonial period. In the early Cold War era — heyday of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy — merely discussing Communism with scholarly objectivity was attacked by the witch-hunters as disloyal.

Now, Brooks notes, the GOP has not only alienated the highly educated regions of the country, it has blown off entire professions.

Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

So now the modern GOP has been stripped down to its core social pathology, its soul laid bear for the world to see. And it ain’t pretty.

See also:

12 thoughts on “Not Exactly the Better Angels of Our Nature

  1. The comment about clinging to their guns and Bibles seems to have been quite correct.
    Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right,
    here I am,
    stuck in the middle with you.

  2. …what has begun to amaze, particularly over the last week or so, is how much of the punditocracy is still barely even tip-toeing toward any sort of discussion about what is essentially an effort to stir up mob violence. If you or I gathered a gaggle of people together and began whipping them with this kind of language and this sort of appeal to raw emotions, we would be taken into custody and charged with incitement to riot. Some of these Bible Spice/McBush “campaign events” are starting to look like they are only one truckload of pitchforks and torches away from spilling into the streets on the hunt for Obama supporters…

  3. We are better off with a wounded animal than a big, robust pack that the site seers keep feeding even though all the sighs say doing so is dangerous. Do not be afraid of these people. If they go wild we will simply have to put a stop to it. Animal control is one of the good guys. It was never going to be pretty, but maybe we can begin to stop the evil neo con bestial madness.

  4. Interesting, I’ve been listening to one of the Teaching Company’s Courses on Terror and Utopia in the 20th Century. In it the Professor talks about how new technologies from the machine gun to the printing press to the urbanization associated with the Industrial Revolution all contributed to large massacres throughout the early 20th century. You could surly point to radio broadcasts in Rwanda as further evidence that technology has further enabled great acts of violence. If Jack K, The Grumpy Forester is correct then just imagine what the Internets can do to the right wing folks. We have already seen someone going into a Unitarian Church armed and ready to kill kill kill. Perhaps we should all be afraid at the moment. I sure hope the Secret Service can keep Mr. Obama safe and sound.

    What a pleasant idea…

  5. “If you or I gathered a gaggle of people together and began whipping them with this kind of language and this sort of appeal to raw emotions, we would be taken into custody and charged with incitement to riot.” — Hmmm. Does that mean it’s about time for Bush to declare martial law? Or maybe it’s the other way round. He always wanted to declare martial law, he just needed the excuse. — I’m not saying it’s going to work, I’m just saying it’s plausible.
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/ten-steps-to-close-down-a_b_46695.html
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/the-battle-plan-ii-sarah_b_128393.html

  6. Maja, I’ve pointed out before the similarities in temperment, among other things, between Bush and McCain, and your ‘middle finger to the world’ puts the bows on both packages.

    McCain the maverick, a label he wears with pride, is in fact little more than his obsession with flipping people off.

  7. Just to repeat myself KingGeorgeThe Tenth, no we should not all be afraid at the moment. Don’t fear the louts. They are a bunch of frightened little children. Lord of the Flies style sure, but children all the same. They are not in charge. We neither need nor heed them.

    I too hope the Secret Service (he should hire Swiss Guards) can keep Obama safe, but maybe we should be thinking ahead to how we respond if they don’t? No more show trials.

  8. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

    Isn’t this the “Obama wouldn’t fit in at the Applebee’s salad bar” goober writing this?

    …how much of the punditocracy is still barely even tip-toeing toward any sort of discussion about what is essentially an effort to stir up mob violence.

    Much less own their own culpability in it.

  9. On the bright side, now’s a great time to bake some rightie noodles.

    Ask a libertarian: Isn’t the coming bubble-caused backlash against free markets going to be counterproductive to their movement?

    Ask a fundie: What is God punishing us for this time? Bush?

  10. The rageaholics on the Right are angry because they see themselves losing their grip on power, and it’s making them angry as hell. I shudder when I hear things like how the McCain/Palin supporters behaved at the rallies. If the Democrats win this election, the Republicans will return to their time-honored habits of obstruction, badmouthing and backstabbing. They can win elections, but they can’t govern.

  11. May I just say the line about Bush being the middle finger extended to the rest of the world is absolutely sublime?

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