Your Republican Platform

Via Rising Hegemon, something to keep in mind as we head towards the next cycle of national elections in 2014:

   Your Republican platform:

   Jobs - No
   Taxes - No
   Gay Marriage - No
   Birth Control - No
   Civil Rights - No
   Pain - Yes
   Guns- OH YES!

The Thinking of a Right Wing Authoritarian

Via They Gave Us a Republic (24 Feb), an interesting consideration of the reasons behind the apparent disconnect in some conservative thinking:

Political Class Exhibits GOP's Insanity
 

Boehner's office, says Chait, has been sending around a Charles Krauthammer column that urges Republicans to cheerfully embrace the budget sequester because it offers the best chance they will have in quite awhile to enact "meaningful" deficit reduction.

By promoting that idea, the Speaker's office is therefore sending two, contradictory messages, says Chait. The first is that Republicans won't compromise at all, "not even offering any of the tax reform they've been dangling for months, not even in exchange for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, to replace the sequester." After all, writes Krauthammer, if Republicans do nothing they get $1.2 trillion in cuts and so they should "get them while you can."

Yet at the same time, Boehner says the President needs show leadership to prevent a sequester that would be "horrible," "devastating" and, if it comes to pass, "all Obama's fault!"

There is a name for this kind of behavior. Professor Robert Altemeyer, who for the past four decades has been studying political extremism from a psychological and cognitive perspective, says one attribute of what he calls the "right wing authoritarian" mindset is that authoritarian ideas "are poorly integrated with one another."

It's as if, says Altemeyer, each idea is stored in a separate file that can be called up and used whenever the authoritarian wants even though he has other ideas, stored in different files that "basically contradict it."

All of us are inconsistent in our thinking," says Altemeyer, "but authoritarians can stupify you with the inconsistency of their ideas."

Take, for example, conservatives who believe we live in an "exceptional" country because it guarantees freedom of speech yet who nevertheless equates patriotism with "My country, love it or leave it."

"When your ideas live independent lives from one another it is pretty easy to use double standards in your judgments," says Altemeyer. "You simply call up the idea that will justify (afterwards) what you've decided to do."
 

The post in question was about spending, deficits, etc., but the greater theme of the logical disconnect in thinking is what resonated with me.  For example, my in-laws are full beneficiaries of Social Security and Medicare...yet they are lockstep devotees of the Republican Party...whose aims are to cut those programs to spend more on Defense.

I would think the older you get, the more you'd come down on the "butter" side of the old "guns and butter" equation.  Yet here the in-laws are, voting against their own self-interest, because Fox News is fair and balanced.  Or something.

 

Guess Who Said It?...and Ultrarunning

1. "Corporations are people, my friend." 
2. "...we don't need more national parks in this country; we need to actually sell off some of our national parks." 
3. "It's long past time for this Administration to stop delaying American energy production off all our shores." 
4. "Overregulation from EPA is at the heart of our stalled economy." 
5. "I'll get us that oil from Canada that we deserve." 
6. "Let EPA go the way of the dinosaurs that became fossil fuels." 
7. "No one will miss a hill or two." 
8. "We have to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency."

Answers:

1. Mitt Romney
2. Rep. Cliff Stearns, FL
3. John Boehner, Speaker of the House
4. Rep. Mike Simpson, ID
5. Mitt Romney
6. Rep. Louis Gohmert, TX
7. Sen. Rand Paul (on mountaintop removal coal mining)
8. Newt Gingrich

All these quotes were in a recent fundraising request from the Sierra Club, of which I have been a member for years.  To me, it's a no brainer that any serious user of the backcountry--such as we Ultrarunners--just has to align philosophically with the principles of conservation and preservation espoused by environment organizations such as the Sierra Club.

Yet in certain places in my social circles, even mentioning the Sierra Club--much less admitting I'm a member--is tantamount to saying that I molest children and kick stray dogs.

Somehow it's become chic to want to sell out our descendants' legacy of things natural, wild, and free, as though we can't afford to protect such things.

We can't afford NOT to.

The Elites Have Lost Control

Via Driftglass, on 13 Feb 2012, we have this great insight from economist Paul Krugman: 

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation! [Gary: a conservative think tank]

 

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy - a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America's defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. 

 

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum - and now the party elite has lost control.

Thus we see conservatives screeching incoherently, conflating religious liberty with birth control--when said religious freedom actually isn't threatened by women controlling their bodies (hint: it's only the male-dominated patriarchy social construct that's threatened).

Also we see the righty base seemingly voting against their own self-interests: demanding smaller, cheaper government with less taxes, all the while saying keep your hands off my Medicare and Social Security...and also all the while looking the other way while the party elites keep pushing deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy.

All this dissonance makes my head hurt.

 

Liberals and Conservatives

Seeing how this is still the tail end of the week in which we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King day, it's appropriate to highlight this succinct post.

It points out one critical difference, perhaps the critical difference, between liberals and conservatives.

Via Digby, a post by David Atkins (16 Jan 2012)

MLK:  "Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'"

Ayn Rand:  "If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."

Atkins then comments:

Conservatives get to claim one or the other. They can't have both.  And if they pick door #2, they can't have this guy, either.

I can't add anything to that.  When somebody else nails it, you quote and offer thanks. 

 

Are Humans Liberal or Conservative by Nature?

I recently read a fascinating post by Gareth Cook of the Boston Globe.  In it he delves into the moral precepts that seem to divide liberals and conservatives:

Scientists have started to provide provocative answers by looking at the roots of morality. The influential psychologist Jonathan Haidt has surveyed the world's cultures and suggested that virtually everyone is born with an innate propensity for five broad moral instincts: fairness, not harming others, loyalty to one's group, respecting authority, and purity.

And in psychological experiments, conservatives value all five of the instincts, yet liberals tend to put far more weight on the first two - fairness and not doing harm - while discounting the other three.

It is easy to see how these play out in our political life. For conservatives, loyalty to a group easily translates into a suspicion of outsiders and, therefore, say, a discomfort with immigration. If respecting authority is a central moral value, then burning a flag is deeply offensive. Liberals want to talk about what is fair, and whether anyone is being hurt, while conservatives respond that liberals are missing the point.

There's more, a lot more.  In fact, the entire post is well worth clicking over to read.

I've previously posted on the differences between liberals and conservatives, here and here.  Now it seems that the discipline of psychology may provide empirical evidence to confirm our gut feelings.

 

When the Mask Slips

From Amanda at Pandagon, a post (I'm using her title) that just begged to be extensively quoted:

One of the markers of conservatism in our modern democracy is a routine willingness to say one thing privately and another publicly.  The reason for this is that our national consensus has turned towards justice, which causes defenders of the old order into a bad situation where they either say what they mean and sound like monsters, or they try to reframe their authoritarian views in liberal terms to confuse the issue.   Historically, this has mostly been a stalling tactic, if in results if not in intention.  Slave owners bought a little more time owning slaves by claiming slavery was good for slaves, because they weren't smart enough for freedom...In the early days of segregation, what was privately expressed as an explicit desire to keep black people as second class citizens was cleaned up and publicly presented as "separate but equal".  When that stopped working, private support for segregation as segregation was cleaned up and presented to the public as "states' rights" or "private property rights".  After desegregation, private anger at black people for demanding equality was cleaned up and presented as "law and order" in public.  You know this history. 

I believe that racism is what developed the strategy, but now it's endemic. Abortion is privately about sluts who can't keep their legs shut, publicly about "life".

Economic policies that that are designed to grow the gap between the haves and have-nots are publicly supported because they supposedly grow the economy and do the opposite. 

Anti-gay bigotry is blatant in private spaces, but about "traditional marriage" in public spaces.

The problem with this strategy is it actually takes a lot of effort to maintain elaborate facades.  And really, only people who are out in public are expected to maintain the facade.  The blatant nastiness is freely expressed in private spaces, which is why, as I've pointed out before, elaborate email chains are one of those things that help create conservative solidarity largely out of the view of liberals.   

Now, most of us do this to one extent or another, but with liberals I rarely hear a direct conflict between their private values and their public ones, but with conservatives, there's often a direct conflict, or at least mismatch, between private values and public ones.

Yet another significant difference between liberals and conservatives.  And one that I would get a lot of head nods about from my liberal cronies, but dismay and denial from my conservative buddies (yes, I have some of those).  Self-awareness seems not to be a strong suit among that crew.

    

Ultrarunning...and the Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives

Just recently saw a an interesting post by Libby Spencer at The Impolitic from some months ago, posted on Saturday, March 13, 2010 (you'll have to scroll down to that day).

I was reading about the Republican National Committee paying for Tea Party signs last night and had an epiphany of sorts. I've been trying to distill the difference between these crazy Tea Party cons and liberals into a few words for a while and I think I finally have it. Conservatives care about "me" and Liberals care about "everybody."

What sparked that thought was the sign that the RNC provided to the event said, "Listen to Me!" If you think about all their rhetoric, it's incredibly self-absorbed. "I want my country back." "Keep your hands off my health care." "The government is stealing my money for taxes." Dan Riehl in the post below calling to euthanize Mrs. Reid says, "I can't recall her ever doing anything for me." These people have no apparent social awareness, nor any desire to contribute to the communal good.

Liberals on the other hand talk about healthcare for all. Equal treatment for all. Civil rights for everyone. Save the planet for the next generations. There are of course exceptions, but generally, it's demonstrably true.

I'll try to articulate in just a couple sentences how I think this liberal-conservative dichotomy relates to what's important in my life and why I think the way I do.

Our biological imperative is to survive and reproduce. It seems to me that behaviors that directly benefit our descendants and favor their survival are good, thus the liberal approach to health care, social programs, etc. seem preferable to me.

And when it comes to UltraRunning, let me just focus strictly on the availability of trails to run on. Wild areas are a national resource that must be protected, not exploited--we need more and larger parks, not fewer. And we must resource them properly (even if it means higher taxes) to ensure their conservation and preservation to the generations that come after.

Hmmm....in both my examples I mention our duty to the next generations. I think about the Mister Tristans of the world and that guides my actions--I can't help but default to Liberal.