Someone who writes, as I do, that everything has gone to shit should say when he thinks that happened as a point of integrity and as a reality check. And how and why it happened, maybe, a more speculative thing, which I will do here even though I try to avoid earnestness, because I don't want to write the sort of thing I don't like to read, but this illustrates a point: I assume my own fallibility. The Republicans do not.
Assume their own fallibility, that is. They think I'm wrong all the time. The pivotal year here is 1994. That's when the Gingrichers, the self-righteous, religious conservatives, came to Washington and ended what collegiality and decency there had been there, and transformed their party and Washington and now the country and the world, to a degree, through their need for certainty and quest for power, because they insist that they are right. They think that rightness is a state of being, not a matter of behavior, so you can be existentially right, which they are in their own estimation.
To the exclusion of everyone else. Southern voters tipped the scales on this but there are two main constituencies in the coalition of crazies, evangelical fundamentalists and Christian fascists. The evangelicals believe that each person is, in effect, their own church. They're the ultimate schismatics. Individualists to the point of self-negation. Religious solipsists, skeptics and pessimists. Atomists of the person. And no one can judge them because their subjective experience of communion with God is transcendently objective to them.
Everyone else's status on that front is unknowable and suspect, however. They are their own authority as channeled from God so they are very much against any other authority like, let's say, the Pope or some imam, and are opposed to the idea of universal human rights since these are wasted on the non-elect. The Christian fascists, including, especially, conservative Catholics, are at the other end of things. An absolute authority exists apart from them in this world in the form of an institution approved by God to which you must submit or you are in league with the devil.
You may not question or challenge this authority. These are anti-individualists, again to the point of self-negation. They are collectivists and corporatists. Unskeptical. Believers and adherents. A direct, personal approach to God and the assumption of such a connection is for them presumptuous and suspect, the distance being too great to bridge. Only within an earthly, institutional context can such a connection be regulated and deemed valid because an unsupervised individual might, simply, screw it up.
Someone like Jimmy Swaggart, maybe. The evangelical way is more left-brain, abstract and analytical. More masculine. They lose their humanity by abstracting themselves from it and associating themselves with God. In effect they think they're God, through close alignment, while living in a world that is material and therefore un-Godlike and crap, and so without legitimacy and unworthy of respect. They are haughty and imperious when it comes to morality.
The fascists are right-brain, empathetic and immersive. They lose their humanity through submission and obedience, the more traditionally feminine way, the dark side of which is that it is parochial and limited in its vision of inclusion. They are servants of God through submission to God's bureaucracies in this world, usually the Church and the Nation. And soldiers for God in the event of an attack, which they are quick to see erroneously because of their tribalism.
There is common ground in the two groups in the need for certainty, which means it is an attempt to escape from the basic conditions of humanity: powerlessness, ignorance and mortality. The fascist approach makes people effectively less than human by abdicating the responsibilities of consciousness and independence to an institution with claims to the certainty of truth, so they really are like sheep and will follow someone off a cliff.
The evangelical approach makes individuals out to be capable of escaping from uncertainty themselves and thereby becoming demigods. By claiming godliness in this world, that is, like Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson. They will lead you off a cliff. And do it again, if they survive. So both approaches get you to the same place, ultimately, dehumanization. You escape from uncertainty at the cost of your humanity. You are de-civilized, dysfunctional and sociopathic. Inhabitants of the ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, also known as the Republican Party, in a marriage made in hell, sociopathic leaders and sheep. What fun.
Evangelical fundamentalists clearly have the tougher time of it in order to make life bearable, since they live with enormous tension in a material world they deem to be inauthentic and shit. They make their existence endurable by establishing an ersatz community through salvation signs and by conferring personhood, the assumption of inalienable human rights and naturally occurring brotherhood being a nonstarter for them. The primary indicators of righteousness are wealth and code language, which they construe as evidence of salvation. But the fundamentalists are unavoidably dehumanized through the doctrines of Perseverance (of the Saints) and Predestination, which mean they are not free and so inhabit a world with no meaningful morality.
Within which their behavior, once they are saved, is irrelevant, thereby removing them from the world of uncertainty, which is to say, humanity. They also confer personhood, meaning salvation status, on non-personal entities such as corporations and countries. Everything becomes an issue of power for them and exclusion since godliness is only possible in this world through rejection of it and power is an attribute of God, the more arbitrary the better. The religious fascists only need to deprive non-adherents of personhood and thereby dehumanize them so that they can be mistreated and killed, in order to maintain normal social relations within their group, but in so doing they also dehumanize themselves, of course.
The fascists are much more likely to come around, though, because they at least have normal relationships within their defined group. Evangelical fundamentalists are profoundly dysfunctional and resistant to reform. They are cultists and may require deprogramming, so they should be written off in the short run. This means that from a practical political perspective the target groups for Democrats are white women and Catholics, assuming the Democrats actually want to win and stem the tide of insanity, but there is diminishing evidence of that.
In the meantime what we are seeing is an institutional example, in the Republican Party, of the efficacy of sociopathy as psychologists normally observe it in individuals. These people get shit done because they are unencumbered by conscience. You have to wonder why they can't accept life on the terms of its offering, but evidently they can't. Probably because of some primal, existential fear, which compels them to come back at it with certainty. Which is sadly unattainable in this life.
On that high note I leave you with warm holiday wishes for a peaceful Christmas and a Happy New Year.
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