Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreson
by Johann Hari via The Independent
How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?
Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."
The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.
When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.
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 that 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 200 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 now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise 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 industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 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.
The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.
A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly 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 care 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 rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.
It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.
These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen 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".
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.
It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy – reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.
For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, 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 this stuff. They are being tricked 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.
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" that Australia exists, or that 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 had a two-pronged strategy: 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 in public 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.
This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. 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 or the greediest constituencies. 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 bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.
How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?
Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."
The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.
When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.
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 that 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 200 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 now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise 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 industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 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.
The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.
A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly 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 care 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 rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.
It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.
These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen 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".
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.
It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy – reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.
For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, 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 this stuff. They are being tricked 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.
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" that Australia exists, or that 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 had a two-pronged strategy: 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 in public 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.
This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. 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 or the greediest constituencies. 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 bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.
17 Comments
CrakeIt might be wise to split the Democratic party, so there's a rightish choice for people after the coming collapse of the GOP.
Of course I would like to see a libertarian choice that wasn't in bed with the church (a Founding Fathers Party?), but broad popular support for libertarianism isn't something I have ever, ever come across.
For that to work you probably need a king as opposition.
gtjwkq says...I too would like to see the Republican party being replaced or overrun by libertarians, I'm guessing the economy collapsing will be the best incentive for the general public to rally in opposition of big government.
KnivesOutWe're currently seeing an exodus from the GOP. Even Texas has become a swing-state. Through the next couple of elections I think we'll see fewer and fewer congressional and senate seats going to republicans, until they're so trivialized as to become totally irrelevant. For a time, we'll have a virtual one-party system.
We may see an eventual shift back to the middle, where moderate or conservative Democrats start running as Republicans. I wouldn't be surprised if they invent a new name for themselves, though, because the word "Republican" is becoming more and more married to ignorance, intolerance, and obstructionism.
RedSkyI think Obama's wise not to make a big fuss over the rumours. If he were to take them on he would project the image that he is seriously entertaining the notion of what they propose, and would make them even more the issue than they are now. Like the article points out, the media likes to play one side against the other no matter how marginal or spurious their opinions are, as is the case with global warming and as the case was to some extent with Obama's birth certificate and the likes of Lou Dobbs professing ambiguity. Sidelining the issue by mocking it though is smart. Obviously it's a cheap way to win an argument without actually having to address it in any real depth, but I guess to get anything done you have to be prepared to get your hands dirty.
Another good article on the same topic - http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1917525-1,00.html
marinaraPartisan politics produces this crap.
How many conservative hosts...
Columnists
TV hosts like Morning Joe
Newspapers
Fox News
Together they produce enough misinformation to produce a wall. Obama promised to breach the wall. He hasn't even come close.
Bill Clinton on the other hand, did beat that wall down, and did it against much stronger opposition.
videosiftbannedmeWhile I don't care for the two party system (there are more than 2 choices to anything), it is inevitable that the GOP will eventually collapse. Remember, the Democrats are the "city" party, while the Republicans are the "rural" party. It's just a matter of time. What I wonder is what will come down the pike to challenge the Democrats? Possibly the Libertarians, or maybe by that time we'll have the Terrans against the off-world Colonists. Remember, England couldn't keep tabs on its children; neither will we.
peggedbeait confuses me how everyone is talking about it like this scary LOUD alternate universe the religious right lives in is brand new.
i dont remember a time when it wasnt like this.
is it because i live in small town texas? is it because its just now being brought loud and clear to an international audience? or does noone else remember republican opposition during the clinton administration? ive been hearing this crazy shit on a daily basis for my whole life.
gwiz665The Internet makes all the loud mouthed idiots sound even louder and even more idiotic.
quantumushroomAverage religious individuals who do not trust government and place their faith above the State are less likely to end up slaves than wise atheists who believe government can solve every problem if only given enough money and power.
JiggaJonson>> ^quantumushroom:
Average religious individuals who do not trust government and place their faith above the State are less likely to end up slaves than wise atheists who believe government can solve every problem if only given enough money and power.
While that's true the same could be said about any other group. Atheists on the whole are rational people (based on my experience) and dont take problems lightly. Yes I think the government can solve a lot of problems for the people of the country but only through honest and rigorous debate. Misinformation only throws shackles around the people who could be otherwise participating in actual discussion and that's what I'm seeing from the GOP latley, a lot of misinformation.
No one accuses legalzoom.com of having 'Death Panels' just because you can create a living will there.
NetRunnerDoes anyone else find it mind boggling the way members of the press will spend page after page analyzing the tactical effectiveness of telling lies, which hinges entirely on the press making it the lead question in interviews and the lead story in newscasts instead of dismissing or debunking the blatant falsehoods?
I mean, if the press were following some standard of journalistic integrity, wouldn't it be completely ineffective?
We'll see what happens with the Republicans. If they get routed in 2010 and 2012, hopefully they'll get that America isn't buying what they're selling, and change their tune (or go the way of the Whigs).
If they make any serious gains in the next two cycles without changing their way of practicing politics, we're going to be in for some seriously bad times for everyone.
nibiyabiWhat would the new right-leaning Democratic branch be called? The Blue Dog Party?
PsychologicObama did not win by a landslide. He got 52.9% of the vote, against McCain's 45.7%. There was a much bigger gap in the electoral vote, but that doesn't represent popularity.
I don't think religion is as big of an issue as lack of proper education (even personal education). "Faith" is a convenient way to understand the mechanics of the world for those without the knowledge (or ability in some cases) to understand the complexities and evidence-standards of science. Even those who enter the study of scientific fields with strong religious beliefs tend to moderate their faith as they learn more.
Even a poorly educated atheist would be more susceptible to unsupported claims than more educated individuals. I've seen this in people I grew up with that didn't care about religion or education... they tend not to require much support for their beliefs, including politics. While religion is often a large part of willful ignorance, it's the low-quality education and culture that allows such mindsets to flourish. Fear and anger tend to be more effective motivational tools than intellectual debate for a disconcertingly large number of people in the USA.
That's just my take on it. None of the people I know who have a solid understanding of science have a positive opinion of any faith-based belief.
Evidence is the line between open-mindedness and gullibility.
MaxWilderSome of you people are clearly dreaming. As much as I would like to see the party of stubborn ignorance die a horrible death, the fact is that the Democrats are not all that much better. The complete lack of effective leadership and unity in the Democratic Party is quickly dissolving any momentum that Obama had coming in from his historic election. This is partly due to the lies that the Conservative Zombies believe without thought, but more due to the inability of the Democrats to pick a plan and just go for it.
I only voted for Obama because I knew he would do less damage to our once great nation than "Five Plane" McCain and Governor Barbie. But I am still amazed at how he is actively trying to rebuild the Republican party by insisting that they have a say in legislation that they have no way of stopping. Add that to the unsurprising fact that no administration will ever prosecute the crimes of their predecessors (or face diminished power and the threat of their own legal grilling later) and it becomes painfully obvious that modern politics is nothing but a high stakes version of the WWE. Every match they come out spewing hateful slander to get the crowd riled up, but none of them would ever get what they truly want without a plausible contender. And the only people really profiting are the show's producers behind the scenes, which in the case of the American political system is corporations and billionaires.
Mark my words, there will be no change until we can get money out of politics. And since everybody is focused on healthcare, wars, abortion, religion, socialism and other bullshit puppet shows, I don't see any changes coming anytime soon.
Psychologic^ Obama apparently thinks that ignoring or attacking Republicans will be counter-productive in the end. He may be right, but he could be very wrong too. It's a political strategy... we'll see how effective it is in a few years.
quantumushroomRemember which party took every opportunity to LIE, misrepresent and distort the events of Hurricane Katrina. A sitting President was accused of not caring (enough), blamed for all the corruption and ineptitude that comes naturally to any useless government behemoth like FEMA (they'll perform just as poorly now, with Obama in the Red House) and the worst of it is, the kooks claiming Bush pushed down the plunger and dynamited the levees were not vocally opposed by a single Democrat (to my knowledge).
Democrats invented demagoguery and they'd have to, as facts and logic are rarely on their side. If a theoretical Republican suggested cutting the budget of a school lunch program, the next thing to occur would be nearby Donkeycrats screaming: "LOOK! THE EVIL CONSERVATIVE IS TRYING TO STARVE POOR CHILDREN!" The DEMagogs are all around us, with liberals falling back on race, class envy and victimhood every time their most current schemes fail (because human nature doesn't change).
Max wrote: I am still amazed at how he is actively trying to rebuild the Republican party by insisting that they have a say in legislation that they have no way of stopping.
The answer is because when the programs fail to work, without Rs on board the Ds will get ALL the blame, and rightly so. I WANT the Crats to shut out the Repubes. Take the receipt for the Fail. 2010 is almost here.
KnivesOutDemocrats invented demagoguery? Woo, that's hilarious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogy
"Demagogy (also demagoguery) (Ancient Greek δημαγωγία, from δῆμος dēmos "people" and ἄγειν agein "to lead") is a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears and expectations of the public..."
Why did we invade Iraq? Because Bush and the neocons Feared the American people into thinking that Saddam has WMDs.
Why did we need an ambiguous, color-coded "Threat Level" system that could be elevated on a whim (or at the cusp of a crucial political event)? Because FEAR was the only tool that they had to control the people, in the absence of reason.
Why are we currently discussing absurd things like "Death Panels" in the debate to reform health-care?
Sorry, but the Republican's have already locked in their monopoly on fear-mongering.
Discuss...
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