Expect the crying to commence November 5th
The right’s two-pronged religion of rage and self-pity
The Right in this country – meaning the faction that followed George Bush for the last eight years – long ago ceased being a movement of political ideas and is driven by two, and only two, extreme emotions: (1) intense, aggressive rage towards their revolving door of enemies, and (2) bottomless self-pity over how unfairly they’re being treated. As their imminent defeat looks increasingly likely (potentially on a humiliating scale), these two impulses are in maximum overdrive, feeding off one another in endless self-perpetuation (the more they lose, the more victimized they feel, the more they rage against their enemies who oppress them, etc.).
The Right’s rejection by the public can’t possibly be due to anything they have done. It can only be due to some extremely vicious enemy that oppresses them uniquely and so very unfairly. For the moment, they’re only losing because The Leftist Mainstream Media hates them and is deeply biased against them.
Go pick whatever right-wing journals or polemicists you want and (with some isolated exceptions) what you will find is this simultaneously self-loving and self-pitying worldview permeating virtually everything they say, think and believe. You can reduce most of their arguments, and all of their group-based drives, to a rudimentary logical proposition: “I am X, and X is both superior and treated with deep unfairness.” It doesn’t matter what “X” happens to be for any one of them – conservative, male, Republican, Christian, Jewish, religious, white, Western, American – that is the formula that expresses how they perceive the world and their role in it. </em>
To that I give a big boo f’n hoo. Instead of accepting that you suck at leadership, and that you hold views far out of the mainstream of America, you mess your pants and hold a pity party.
Boo f’n hoo. Go the way of the Whigs. And I don’t mean Afghan.
