1997: Robespierre Of The Right
1997: Robespierre Of The Right
Only the purest of the movement had gathered at Coronado: men like Oliver North, Pat Robertson, and Larry Pratt (whom the press had recently drummed into exile for his alleged ties to white supremacists). In the past, the group's clandestine revival meetings had spawned liberal warnings of a right-wing conspiracy.
But this morning, the council would plot against its own internal enemies: GOP apostates. And the chief conspirator was Paul Weyrich, the man who founded the Heritage Foundation, orchestrated the party's alliance with evangelical Christians, and, more than any other figure, organized the right inside the Beltway. "I will tell you that this is a bitter turn for me," Weyrich confessed. "I have spent thirty years of my life working in Washington, working on the premise that if we simply got our people into leadership that it would make a difference.... And yet we are getting the same policies from them that we got from their [Rockefeller] Republican predecessors." It was time, Weyrich concluded, to contemplate the once unconscionable: another revolution, this time against "our people."
Funny how in 1987 Weyrich blamed the democratic process for someone as inexperienced as Oliver North being allowed to fumble the ball during the Iran Contra scandal, but just 10 short years later, he was ready to ask for North's help to stage a revolution against the American people...
Conservatives inhabit a subjective reality that runs on naked tribalism. Strict hierarchy isn't their goal: it's how they think everything already works. I cannot overstress: everything. If a rightful authority moved a "falling rocks" sign, the rocks would fall somewhere else.
Anything else is proof that someone is in the wrong position. Right things are things said by right people. It is impossible for someone to simply be incorrect, because there is no objective means to evaluate claims. They can only be accepted or rejected based on interpersonal trust.
So of course they figure, what they need is a really really smart guy, but one who says what they want to hear. That's all we're doing - right? That's all there is.
Their stated ideals are ad-hoc justifications. All that has ever mattered is ingroup loyalty. Nothing they do makes sense until you understand this.
I don't think it's all conservatives, but I think this relates to an inability to understand what empathy actually is. When people see it simply as a "weakness," or a tool used to manipulate and gain sympathy, they're either ignoring or missing a very important aspect of how useful it can actually be.
Empathy is a nonverbal means of emotional communication, and it allows you to "think about what others are thinking," and how it may or may not align with your own thoughts and conclusions.
The inability to do this, is actually itself a very big weakness that results in all or nothing/naked tribalism behavior. Then when people are like "why the fuck would you do that?" That's when you start getting the justifications like if I didn't do it somebody else would have, bc that's what I would do, and I can't really comprehend on a non surface level that other people aren't me.
I was listening to a podcast today about the Iran Contra and the advisors to Reagan during his first administration. This was when the Heritage Foundation presence was really strong.
They tried to keep Reagan from ever interacting with Americans at a one-on-one level, because they knew if he heard about something from an individual (rather than just an abstract group of strangers), he would often feel compelled to help solve the issue.
I believe that's kind of the case with the majority of conservatives, and humans in general. It's a lot easier to ignore something if you can't relate to it or if you just don't let yourself think about it too much.
It was still shitty that Reagan's policies ultimately harmed so many people, and definitely helped us end up where we are now. But it's also kind of insane to think that the people advising him literally tried to shield him from the reality of what his policies were doing to individuals, because they saw his very basic level of empathy as a weakness, and the individual Americans who were asking for help as "manipulative," simply because they were turning to their president to solve the issues he had created and had the power to fix.
I honestly believe the whole movement we're seeing on the right by Christian nationalists to convince people that "empathy is a disease" is a way to keep their base brainwashed and under their control. If they train people that anger and accusations of manipulation should be the default response to anything that makes you stop and think too much when something feels morally wrong or unjustified, it makes it easier to outgroup/distance from and label the people that are being mistreated as other or somehow less than human.
That tracks with how conservatives develop progressive views the moment their family is affected. Like Dick fucking Cheney being okay about gay rights because he has a gay daughter. But again: that's just interpersonal relations as the basis for moral judgement. Conservatism, as a worldview, is that practice. Right-wing politics are the most obvious extension of that - 'ingroup good' means tribalism, our tribe is best tribe, someone's gotta be king. The myth of small-c conservatives is a story they tell. But this pattern of behavior can exist in any context. It's how we get tankies insisting any leftist-sounding dictatorship must be good, because leftists are the ingroup, and ingroup good. End of thought. The rest is just shuffling cards to create pretense for that conclusion.
I don't think anyone has to be trained into this. That's the problem. This is humanity's default. This is how things worked in the ancestral environment, and it was a lot easier than all this thinky-thinky crap, and it usually turned out fine. We barely even noticed it until everyone's day-to-day thoughts were archived in black and white. Lone events may be written off as hypocrisy. The global pattern is an epistemological crisis.