| Gather ye political pet peeves, people, and plug them into my new project.
Usually people can disrupt a comment thread by talking about something that's totally off-topic. This diary is a bit different. Sure you can disrupt it by being an asshole, or by talking about irrelevant non-political issues. But if you're simply fixated on your own particular issue, that's not a problem this time out. I'm looking for as many different issue-area ideas as possible that I can deal with under a unified framework: the framework of quantifying conservative victimology.
I'll explain about what I'm looking for more specifically at the end, but first let me talk about the broad outlines of what I'm up to, by way of how I came to it.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a few diaries about the cultural theory of risk, and a particular version of it known as cultural cognition. (Here, here, and here.) What attracted me to it was trying to answer the question of why people deny global warming. The answer provided by this view is that people adopt facts that fit with their values/worldviews and threat perceptions.
At one level, I find this argument persuasive. And yet, there's a real problem with it: it treats everyone more or less equally, whether the threats they perceive are quite real or almost entirely imaginary. It also ignores the influences of hegemonic discourse. Now, I'm the first to admit that there are unrealistic people all across the political spectrum. But that's not the same as saying there are equal numbers of equally unrealistic people all across the political spectrum. There are real differences, and one of the most noticeable examples of this is the general phenomena of conservative victimology.
I've written a few diaries about it recently. First, I wrote one about the mythology of Christian martyrs--the apparently widespread belief touted by Rick Warren, among others, that hundreds of thousands of Christians are martyred for their faith each year. Despite this apparently widespread belief, the Warren spokesperson I talked with had in mind the same site I did, which actually names specific martyrs, but couldn't even fill its 5 five featured slots with martyrs from last year. Given this evidence, in a followup diary I estimated that the fear of Christian martyrdom was inflated on the order of ~10^5 times. (Actually closer to 29,000, but I was feeling generous at the time.)
Then, after the Citizens United decision, when conservatives started the meme that it would "level the playing field" with MoveOn.org, I calculated the ratio of MoveOn's 2008 contributions to total US corporate profits. This, too, turned out to be inflating MoveOn's fearsome power about 29,000 times, and I reported on both ("Rightwing victimology ratio: More than 10,000-to-1").
So I began to think that I was onto something and that I should try to look at other ways to quantify conservative victimology. |
| Several ideas occurred to me fairly quickly. One was a topic that I've been writing about for quite some time--the conservative fear of virtually non-existent voter fraud, as an excuse for voter suppression. I'll be posting a diary about that later on, which will just be a first stab at what I consider a very fruitful application of this approach to quantifying conservative victimology. There's lots of data out there, although much of it is fragmentary, or limited in scope. There's also a community of researchers and activists whose work is an enormous help for what I'm trying to do.
Two other ideas that occurred to me almost at the same time were (1) the levels of actual fraud from defense contractors and the like vs. the baseless fraud scare re ACORN's paltry $3 million and (2) the amount of money that whites would see as just compensation for the cost of being black vs. the actual cost. On further reflection, I decided that the second one was more of a piece of evidence for the broader example of white complaints re affirmative action vs. the actual costs to blacks of ongoing discrimination. This is also something I've written about before, so I have some idea going in of at least part of the contours of what's involved, and what the data looks like.
Another topic that immediately suggests itself is the conservative hysteria over "outing" anti-gay activists vs. the enormously widespread reality of anti-gay violence. This is closely connected to the very first example that caught my attention, but it arises most directly from the absurd example of the Supreme Court shutting down the video replay of the Federal Prop 8 trial, justified 5-4 on just such imaginary grounds. The challenge here--as may well be the case in many examples--is to find the right quantifiable measures to compare.
So, this is where you come in. Of course you can say anything you want in the comments. Tell me this is a stupid idea, tell me someone else has already done it, whatever. But I'm especially interested in hearing your ideas about (a) examples of conservative victimology related to a political issue you know and/or care a good deal about (or that's important to someone who's close to you), and (b) how we might go about quantifying the conservative's imagined victimization vs. reality. These quantifying measures can take the form of showing that (a) conservatives are not hurt nearly as much as they imagine (a handful of martyrs vs. hundreds of thousands), or that (b) others are hurt vastly more than they are (voter suppression affects millions of people--stay tuned for that), or (c) anything else that you brilliant people can come up with to make me go "D'oh!"
So, by all means, jump in a tell me your ideas. |
