When One Party Loses Its Mind

My forthcoming newspaper column:

Think we’re overtaxed? Overregulated? We can talk. If it’s your opinion public education has problems and you have ideas, it’s conversable. If you believe our country is heading in the wrong direction, let’s debate. Which direction, especially. We could have a conversation about military vs. social spending, and where the balance is; to what extent each protects us. I’ve even had almost room-temperature excursus about why, in successful societies, people care for one another. 

However. 

If you believe the planet isn’t warming, or humans have nothing to do with it, or it’s not serious, there’s no point in wasting either of our time. If you deny evolution or feel sure the earth is six thousand years old, or flat, I’ll defend your right to such beliefs, but they announce the impossibility of fruitful back-and-forth. Likewise if you think homosexuality is a choice. I suppose we could discuss whether tax cuts pay for themselves, but we wouldn’t get far.  

The need to reject indisputable facts is something that puzzles me about humans. In our evolutionary history, gut feelings no doubt played an important role in survival. React first, analyze later: it got us a long way. So, several hundred thousand years ago, did prehensile tails, the vestiges of which we all retain, occasionally causing coccygodinia. 

According to polls, forty percent of Republicans are certain Russian election interference is fake news created by liberals to distract Trump from his job. This they believe despite knowing every relevant intelligence agency has concluded otherwise and, shown the evidence, so has every member of involved congressional committees, Democrat and Republican. Of Republican voters who acknowledge it occurred, most seem undisturbed. (In a recent challenge, American hackers broke into voting machines in minutes.)  

In political fora, many Republicans insist our economy didn’t tank until Obama took over, and continued to decline throughout his presidency. Presenting them with indisputable facts makes no difference. The best hope is that such people are trolling. Otherwise it’s a serious mental defect of information processing, the same kind that rejects unwelcome news as fake. In theory, voting presumes the ability to evaluate data; this broad-based dismissal of evidence by a major political party is ominous. 

I don’t think forty percent of Republicans are innately stupid or unable to learn new things. In fairness, they’ve been victimized by intentional disinformation for decades, so it’s not entirely their fault. Whatever the explanation, because it requires both sides accept basic facts, rational discourse has become all but impossible. If political beliefs are a mutable hodge-podge, especially in a messy democracy like ours, facts are not. For propaganda to take root, there must be fertile soil. In that, Democrats are a raised-bed backyard garden. Today’s Republicans are a corporate farm. Our democracy was designed by men who didn’t imagine such a divide was possible. 

Aided by clever gerrymandering, Republicans dominate state and federal legislatures. In many red states, not unlike the US Senate (and the current president, thanks to the quirky Electoral College), Republicans received fewer votes than Democrats. And those elected tend to be the most rigid denialists. If it were true, as third-party nihilists argue, that there’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans, it wouldn’t matter. 

But when one’s adherents are consistently disdainful of facts, and when its leaders count on that instead of winning on ideas, a pathologically lying president who considers the White House “a dump” and lies about Boy Scout phone calls is what happens. The White House revolving door happens. An EPA following the law only by court order, its scientists resigning, happens. Incoherent foreign and domestic policy by tweet, Pizzagate, Seth Rich fake Fox “news” allegedly pushed by the president all happen; a president who’s made it impossible to believe anything he says. Happens. The Republican Prevaricare farce happens (Lindsey Graham called it a disaster and a fraud. And voted for it.)  

Ironically, the same information-processing deficiency that allowed Trump’s voters to disregard his lifelong moral and ethical failings, his businesses based on inherited (and laundered?) money and swindling, caused them not to reckon how incapable of governing he’d be. His ineptitude is the only thing saving us, so far, from dictatorship. Or worse. The arch-conservative NRO gets it. Republican Senator Jeff Flake, too. Who’s got next? 

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Exceptionalism Exception

A while back I mentioned the curious case of right-wing ceding of all American foreign policy power to Israel. At that time, I pointed out Mitt "I'm So Just Like You That I'll Say Whatever You Want Me To" Romney's claim that there should be not a whisper of space between Israel's stated policies and ours. Now, just so there's no doubt that such a stance remains R policy -- that, in other words, Israel calls the shots based on its self-interest and we never raise an objection, no how, no way -- Eric Cantor (who just took his finger out of the wind and decided it was now safe to endorse Romney) makes it crystal clear:

"we need to make sure that this president is also going to stand by Israel and not allow his administration to somehow speak contrary to what our ally thinks is in its best interest." (emphasis added)

Think about it: "not speak contrary" to an ally's view of its best interest. In what world but that of a certified RWS™ does the US cede all policy regarding any ally to that ally? (The above link says all this better than I, naturally.)

Of course, with RWS™ and teabaggRs, consistency of thought (or thought itself, by all evidence) is hardly a prerequisite to opening one's mouth. As long as you're taking a position opposite to that of President Obama, fire away, even if it means reversing what you originally advocated (individual mandates, contraception coverage, negotiated dates for Iraq withdrawal, controlling Medicare costs, whatever) before he took that position. Simple, right?

But just imagine what RWS™ and teabaggRs would be saying, shouting from every one of their locked and loaded propaganda outlets, if Barack Obama said he'd let (insert any country but Israel here) decide what US policy toward it would be. Or, for that matter, if he'd preempted them and said it about Israel!!

These are hypocritical unamerican idiots. (Yes: unamerican. What else is it when you defer all policy decisions to another nation?)

It will ever mystify me that anyone who values thought -- even the most minimal thought, like whether to use a spoon to eat soup -- could be persuaded to vote for any of these guys. Is there no point at which a line would be drawn in the sheep-shit? Will blind partisanship for its own sake, with no regard to the actual needs of our country, ever be seen as having gone too far?

It's past time to get rid of the crazy, blind, and mindlessly uncompromisingly doctrinaire people that were voted into office the last time around: ie, the teabagger Congressmen and women and the ones of like mind that preceded them. The only way we'll get past the blockheaded stupidity that's driving us toward ruin is if voters demand it.

Which is exactly the problem: between the carefully orchestrated RWS™ disinformation network and the deliberate and highly successful Rovian efforts to stop people from thinking -- from knowing how to think or even to notice that they're not thinking -- added to the gerrymandering of Congressional districts to favor the election and never-ending reelection of the most partisan representatives, there's no real hope for changing things. We're stuck in a partisan divide that threatens to destroy us.

And, no -- decidedly no! -- there's no equivalency on the two sides of the chasm. When Mitch McConnell, in the midst of the worst economic crisis in decades, says his number one priority is to make Obama a one-term president (not helping the economy, not creating jobs, not addressing health care), there's no equivalency. When there's only one "news" network that constantly and deliberately fabricates outrage, falsifies and decontextualizes the words of its targets; when only one side has a talk-radio cabal of crackpots who defame and lie and who are lionized by millions because of it, whose politicians are so afraid of antagonizing them that they stay silent or wimpily say "I'd have used other words," there's no equivalency. When one side steadily waters down its ideas to include the ideas of the other side (the ACA, consumer protection, banking rules, taxes, safety net and education and infrastructure spending, and more) in order to get a vote or two from that side and still gets zero votes; when one side filibusters every bill, every nominee to a degree the other side never has (and likely never will), there's no equivalency.

Not to mention that listeners to right-wing talk radio, who seem much more needy when it comes to having their prejudices and misinformation continually reinforced, outnumber those of left-wing radio by a factor of 65 million to 3 million (according to Talkers magazine, so it's said); which speaks so loudly of entrenched brainwashing on one side only that one must cover one's ears. And which means that for every left-wing conspiracy theory (name more than one!), there are dozens on the right. No equivalency. None.

People need to wise up. But Karl Rove and Roger Ailes know that, too. Their greatest fear is that it could happen before they've finished taking the money and running. So they've carefully crafted a swath of people who'll never be enlightened, who'll never notice how they've been played to act against their own interests, thinking they're carrying some imagined torch of freedom. (Religious freedom, no less!!) How pathetic. How easy it's been. How badly it speaks of our country, in what miserable light it puts us, how ill it bodes for our future.

Teabaggers, the ball is in your court. I predict you'll never see it, much less pick it up.