Recent Passage from Deans Conservatives Without Conscience

[ls317]

I've been contemplating a passage from Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience. For those of you who have recently emerged from a coma, this is a book where Watergate whistle blower John Dean and Barry Goldwater set out to explore the reason that seemingly good Americans have become seemingly good Germans, particularly on the right. His conclusion was simple: Right wing authoritarians are taking over and have used fear, division, and ignorance to encourage climate of double think, superstition, and paranoia sufficient to organize the authoritarian personality under a single political banner.

In one passage that has been particularly on my mind lately, Dean says something to the effect that: For the authoritarian the world is comprised of the weak and the strong, the deserving who can take it, and the suckers who get taken from. He went on somewhat to describe a machivalian character that is driven by a kind of inner righteousness and comfort with ones own intrinsic "reasonableness" that, ironically reasonable debate and challenge to the thinker's paradigms are excluded entirely. Attempts to "let them in" are seen as weakness and are later exploited in the all to familiar coldness with which we saw such feats as the paradoxical co-complaints that Kerry was "the most liberal liberal in the world" and whenever Kerry reached across the isle was slapped with "Kerry stands for nothing! Hes a flip flopper!".

The question emerges then: what do we do about them?

Is the only choice remaining, to take up pies and fling them at conservatives as soon as they are identified, driving them underground - to plot their sticky revenge? I am convinced that if they are able to communicate with one another, surely we can communicate with them...

This idling in the back of my diseased mind...I was considering how the right wing is funding Al Queda, how they are driving up taxes, how they are ignoring religion entirely, how they aren't even prusuing their own stated goals of establishing some kind of hegemony. We are defeating them while their leaders continue to get rich. For a moment, the koolaide washed over me and I saw it from their view.

Suckers.

the right wing rank and file are suckers. I imagined a dozen conversations I had been in where I carefully shared, explained, brought materials, did everything to show them how our path as a nation was foolhardy and wrong...I never thought to tell them: You are being played. You are a sucker.

Somehow, this obvious truth seemd too rude to state overtly...it seemed to obvious an implication of what I was saying. I never said it. You think Bush is fighting "islamism"? YOU ARE A SUCKER. You think "libruls control holywood"? It's because you are a sucker and your leaders are taking your money. You think a bunch of guys from Saudi Arabia blew up a tower in New York because they hated your right to bear arms? You are a sucker and you deserve what you get.

I will look into trying to talk to the right from this frame and see if they can better hear me. It's time for me to tell my friends who have bought into a delicate construction of ideas known as modern 'conservatism' that they are, in fact, suckers being used by stinking rich men who will never give them a piece of the pie.

As we stare a recession in the face, antoher war, more lies...let the right wing's ears burn with our rebuke. It's because you were weak. You are in this position because you are a sucker.

[lligrd]

1. It Won't Work, I Have Tried It

A fool is the last one to know it.