In Black Swan, Natalie Portman, a pristine and proper ballerina, must figure out how to go beyond her ability to dance the white swan in "Swan Lake." She must find the passion, a darker side if you will, to convincingly portray the seductress that is the black swan. Of course, as she takes this leap, Portman's character is drawn deeper and deeper into a hallucinatory psychosis, unable to distinguish between reality and delusion.
In the film, Portman must become the Black Swan to play it, there is no middle ground where she can inhabit the character, but not the character's life - which causes her to lose all the self-control and discipline she has gained on stage as well as off. Which would seem to work the same way as conservatism, at least with regard to social policy - as right wingers fear in their fevered and misfiring synapses that we'll all become black swans just like they would (and often still do), without authoritarian rigidity dictating every aspect of our personal lives.
In other words, much like in the film, in the conservative worldview there can also be no middle ground. Either we all become Pat Robertson - you know, before the newfound love of the pot plant - or you know where things are headed. To quote the great Dr. Venkman from Ghostbusters, "human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together...mass hysteria!"
This same dance has played out with policies relating to birth control, divorce, religion in schools and a variety of other issues. But most recently, it reared its Rovian head to spit venom on legislation that would make gay Americans equal to the rest of us under law and started a brawl among conservatives that is worthy of Camille and Kelsey Grammar.
The first of their two most recent Swan Lake moment happened during the vote in the recent lame-duck Congress to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. The Family Research Council, recently rewarded for all their hard work at being bigots with the designation of "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, pulled some statistics out of a part of their body they're afraid to acknowledge to claim that "homosexual assault" would skyrocket if we let openly gay service members into our armed forces.
These happy - or gay if you will - protectors of our purity worried aloud about the "sleeping" and/or "intoxicated" victims of what would seem to be gay sexual Terminators not simply satisfied with converting foxholes into Liberace revivals, but forcing themselves on anyone and everyone within stone's throw of their tiaras.
Glenn Beck's CPAC speech was a rare gem of political discourse. I encourage everyone to read it so that they really understand where modern conservatism is going. Some of my friends are quite accurately comparing his "progressivism is cancer" screed to fascist rhetoric by people like Mussolini and Franco, because the parallels are striking, but I want to focus more on how the speech's philosophy is a template for the conservative cause right now.
Beck's essential message was that I crawled my way from the dung pile without any help, and that's what makes America great ,so we shouldn't help anyone in trouble. From his twisted personal story to his twisted vision of American history, Beck took rapturous CPACers on a classic tour of American conservative ideology. From his paranoid delusional ranting about how liberals hate anyone successful to his Social Darwinist view of society and nature, he laid out the conservative line and took it to its logical conclusion. And the audience loved it. The quintessential moment in the speech? When Beck explained why we shouldn't be helping anyone in need: "There's some sort of element of competition to life. Oh that's not natural. Really? Go watch the lions eat the weakest." And the audience burst into laughter and applause- as I wrote the other day, these conservatives really are into cruelty, so the idea of lions eating the weak got them going.
Beyond the celebration of eating the weakest, they money paragraph on the speech was this classic rendition of conservative thought:
We believe in the right of the individual. We believe in the right of the individual. We believe in the right, you can speak out, you can disagree with me, you can make your own path. But I'm not going to pay for your mistakes, and I don't expect you to pay for my mistakes. We're all going to make them, but we all have the right to move down that road. What we don't have a right to is: health care, housing, or handouts. We don't have those rights. Every time the government grows we lose more of who we are. When you give up your right to struggle... you're giving more of your freedom away.
In the conservative world view, each individual is on their own. The best society will be created if each of us goes our own way, with absolutely no help from anyone, and does exactly what we want to do, no matter who it hurts. Because that invisible hand of the marketplace makes individual greed a source of strength, and because if the weak are not "eaten", society itself becomes weaker. Like the Social Darwinists of the post-Civil War era, conservatives such as Beck clearly believe, as William Graham Sumner put it back in 1893, that every society faces only two alternatives: "liberty, survival of the fittest" or "liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest." Beck said, "As I read the Constitution...the only job of the United States government is to save us from bad guys." The way Sumner put it was that government had only one purpose, which was to protect "the property of men and the honor of women."
Conservatives' answer to the question "Am I my brother's keeper?" is a resounding Hell NO. And that is the essential divide between them and the progressivism which Beck describes as a cancer: progressives believe that all of us are in this together. When our child is weakened by a chronic illness, or our parent by old age, we don't abandon them in the wilderness so that the lion can eat them up (and then laugh about it). When our brother stumbles and hits bottom, we don't stand back and see if he can pull himself up by his own bootstraps, we lend him a helping hand. When our sister is abused and treated unfairly by an employer, we don't tell her she's on her own, we work with her to make things fairer. We believe in a community that helps each other survive and prosper, because we don't want to live in a world where only the strongest and wealthiest and - yes - luckiest survive. We don't have fantasies that all our success is of our own making because we know that without good families, good neighbors, good school and libraries and roads and bridges paid for by public dollars, that without all that, we'd be much less likely to make it on our own. In spite of Beck's paranoia, we have no problem with people being successful. I have never once heard any progressive attack Steve Jobs or Eric Schmidt for their success, or attack the local small businessperson making a good living because he or she is supplying products a community wants. But what we do believe is that those lucky enough to be successful have a responsibility to give something back to their fellow citizens.
I will choose the "weakness" of a compassionate society over the brutal kind of "let the lions eat the weak" vision of Glenn Beck's perfect society any day of the week. Am I my brother's keeper? My answer is yes.
Yesterday afternoon, former Republican Congressman and 2008 Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr had the audacity to say, "Waterboarding is torture." The reason it took audacity is that he was at CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. He was promptly booed.
Instead of adhering to the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, conservative ideological leaders and Republican leaders have decided to shoot for political expediency, stubbornness, and sadism.
Last weekend, I wrote a 6-part series exhaustively going through Gerard Alexander's WaPo commissioned editorial, "Why are liberals so condescending". I called it "Conservative condescension: Projection and conservative victomology on parade". There's a brief reminder of what was in each part on the flip. You'd think I had enough already. But there's some very good reasons why this is not the case.
First of all, a very good point was raised by Oaktown Girl last weekend about the need to come up with the exact opposite of what I had provided--a short--very short--response to Alexander that could be widely disseminated to counter the potential power of his narrative. We're talking one-liners here, folks--elevator speeches at most.
I'll be running a diary on that--soliciting your suggestions--later today, currently scheduled for 3:30 PM EST.
Second, I wanted to do up a systematic shredding of his touting of "welfare reform" as an example of something that conservatives got right and liberals got wrong because of their "condescension." I'll be doing a diary on that sometime tomorrow.
Third there were a couple of stunning rebukes of Alexander in the news this week. The first is relative simple to deal with--turns out that 80% of Americans are condescending liberals!Yikes! But the second takes up the vast bulk of this diary: a delving into the weirdness of CPAC. I'll just say this flat-out, you don't get much more condescending than the way conservatives talk about President Obama. But there's something much uglier and more primitive going on here, and I'm not talking racism, though that's certainly part of the mix. I'm talking primitive psychological processes that I've written about before that need to be looked at again.
I have been on the progressive side of the aisle virtually my whole life (being around a lot of Republicans in Nebraska, I did flirt with being a Republican when I was eight years old, but fortunately my older brother and sister talked me out of that quickly), but I have always believed that conservatives in American history had an honorable tradition in part. Yes, they have the pro-slavery, anti-women's suffrage, and Great Depression inducing Republicans in their midst, but they also had honorable patriots like John Adams and Everett Dirksen. Modern-day conservatives, however, have decided to throw the honorable part of conservatism under the bus along with every other sentiment that might get in their way.
The pro-torture crowd has taken over modern conservatism. People at the CPAC convention are firing themselves up with cries of "waterboard them" and cheering wildly as speakers advocated locking political prisoners away forever at Gitmo. Republicans are embracing a movement that trafficks in secessionism, birtherism, and making threats about armed revolt.
While there has always been a crazy streak in the conservative movement- the John Birch Society founder used to call Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent- the most wild extremists have never taken over the movement lock, stock and barrel before. Today they are thoroughly in control.
Here's what I find so puzzling. Let me throw out some random quotes for you, and you tell me which socialist tract they came from:
"Love mercy, show kindness, and walk humbly with your God"
"I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome, lacking clothes and you clothed me, sick and you visited me, in prison and you came to see me... in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me"
"He has filled the starving poor with good things, and sent the rich away empty"
"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favour [when the poor would be forgiven their debts] from the Lord"
Okay, you probably guessed it: the socialist tract of which I speak is what is otherwise known as the Christian Bible. I've looked all through it for passages about how you should torture people, and perpetuate cruelty, but I couldn't seem to find them.
Jesus didn't talk about torturing people, he talked about helping the poor. George Washington forbade the use of torture even in the darkest days of the American Revolution when the British were doing it to our troops. Jesus and Washington seem to be the two people conservatives claim as their greatest heroes. Can you explain this to us, guys? The answer to "What Would Jesus Do" is definitely not torture.
I respect a conservatism that worries about the unintended consequences of change, and gets uncomfortable when government gets bigger or deficits get higher. A conservatism that exults in waterboarding, in torture used by the Inquisition and the Japanese in World War II? There is no honor in that. There is no justification for it. The conservative movement has been taken over by the pro-cruelty faction, and is on a dark, dark path.
For some reason, I just caught about 15 seconds of CPAC on C-SPAN. The snippet I heard in that time was:
Can we awaken our generation of Obama zombies? Yes my brothers and sisters, yes we can!
With messages like these, it is stunning, really, that conservatives have done so poorly with the youth of America, brain-dead, flesh-eating, and disease-riddled as those youth may be:
Having listened to right-wing talk radio religiously for many years--it's sort of a hobby--I think I understand Wingnut America. It is comprised of two groups: the Leaders and the Followers. It is a symbiotic relationship but one in which the Followers have absolutely no power. They are completely dependent on the Leaders to provide them with the Products of Hate that make their lives worth living. Moreover, the precise nature of the Products is of no concern to the Leaders. During the nineties we saw an endless stream of books demonizing the Clintons. After 9/11 we saw the North Korean-style glorification of George W. Bush. And shortly after the election of 2004--when Republican-led debacles became so numerous and undeniable that only the most dim-witted Followers could fail to see them--we saw the rise of the Great Brown Menace from Mexico.
The Leaders care only about separating the Followers from their money. The Followers care only about finding people to hate. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, James Dobson, Michelle Malkin--they all know what their next meal ticket looks like: John McCain and a Democratic president joined at the hip, the source of all Wingnut misery.
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