Damon Linker today in the New York Times:
A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is ... giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.
It's good to see someone writing about this in a high-profile place. My only complaint is that Linker doesn't go far enough. He's right that catastrophism has lately infiltrated the Republican intelligentsia, but they're followers, not leaders. The evangelical right, in particular, has been there for years, and was joined by folks like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin a decade ago. Catastrophism has gone mainstream since then, and it's only recently that intellectuals joined the bandwagon.
It's been common for a while on the right to believe that liberals hate America because they think it's the root source of racism, militarism, gun culture, Christian nationalism, greed, and police violence. So things like terrorism, high inflation, and illegal immigration aren't just ordinary problems of the kind that every country has, but problems that liberals have deliberately spawned and secretly bankrolled as a way of weakening and eventually bringing down America as a world power. On the Christian right, the issues are a little different—tending toward abortion, gay rights, divorce, and the rise of atheism—but the belief that liberals are deliberately degrading America out of sheer hatred is much the same.
And now the intellectuals are on board too, providing an elaborate, footnoted superstructure for beliefs that lots of conservatives already have. This is the basis for the militant refusal to compromise among the most extreme precincts of the right. If you thought your opponents weren't merely misguided, but deliberately trying to bring down the country, you'd feel the same way they do.
> If you thought your opponents weren't merely misguided, but deliberately trying to bring down the country
Hmmm... that's exactly what I think. Except I have actual evidence.
I wonder when we'll actually start treating the propaganda outlets driving all of this like the existential threat to our country that they are?
Apparently "freedom of speech" is a suicide pact, even when it has been weaponized by our enemies foreign and domestic.
It will need to become obvious to an overwhelming majority that they are existential threats.
For that, it will need to get worse than it is now.
But if the elections in 2024 are accompanied by substanial amount of violence, maybe it will be enough.
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Great. Now add in the right wing's worship of the second amendment and increasingly obvious predilection to violence ... and our justice system's slow motion wheels, reluctance to charge right wingers as potential criminals, and the next decade or so should be a real ride.
But no one will call this mental illness?
Because it isn't. At least not unless you want to stretch diagnostics into something they aren't.
This is plain old nihilistic will-to-power, old as the hills.
A population susceptible to any extreme idea as long as it's extreme and unprovable is not about merely will-to-power. That's just a conservative.
For these people the unprovability makes it impossible to disprove and that makes it real for them.
In the past they were easy to organize to vote for Republicans who would vote to protect the wealthy and appease them with crumbs, but now they're being organized to vote for Republicans who will vote to protect their unprovable fantasy world and appease the wealthy with casual gestures.
The key is that they must be faced with an unreal imaginary, safe, existential threat where having a parade and propitiating the volcano god makes them feel like they've done something, but if they were to think about a real threat they'd be paralyzed because it would only highlight their powerlessness and complete incapacity to even understand how it works, like climate change.
The more there's a threat that can't be directly engaged the more they retreat into looking for helpless victims and parades. How is that not a mental illness?
And there are probably about a dozen other mental illnesses tagging along for the ride while that's going on.
Generally agree about nothing new under the sun, but there is a quality of ... childishness, immaturity, even naïveté about the MAGAts, the silly fundamentalists, and now their "intellectual" comrades. It's not quite ODD -- although that certainly afflicts some of them -- but more like the "nuh-UH!" that's the reply of any truculent third-grader under challenge. It's not only that they have no good replies to criticism, or that they're simply ignoring it and bulling through; it's more like they're simply unable to reply, and they fall back on whiny foot-stomping.
America's political culture -- especially that on the Right -- is profoundly immature in many ways.
The article is behind a paywall, but the bar for being a right-wing "intellectual" is pretty low. Being published by The American Mind is usually sufficient, or being employed by a think tank. And of course at the time he gave this speech, d'Souza was a college president! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAjGxvCc3qE
Here's a free link...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/04/opinion/sunday/conservative-intellectuals-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8Ew.j185.rxRtYAImgOgG&smid=url-share
Thanks.
Damon Linker is an excellent commentator worthy of more attention.
What else can they do? Advance a positive conservative agenda? Trickle down econ and no regulation are all they have. They have to make Ds and libs the enemy and attack the enemy the cause of Trump's American Carnage. Looking at the carnage around me I have to misquote Churchill. Never in history have so many been so pissed about so little.
Those people are nuts. They belong in a mental hospital.
Unfortunately their preferred presidential candidate has a distinctly non-zero chance of winning next year.
No doubt off-track but still likely better than whatever this post is supposed to be about. Raise taxes or cut Social Security and Medicare? Barrel-bottom scrapings.
I'm much more concerned about what AI will do to the religion of the English language. Here's one I just saw: "His only option to stand up to Fletcher his drums." Should be ...is his drums. Do writers now assume we know what words to insert where? God help AI, e.g. Writers of English have gotten very sloppy over the past, well, my lifetime. So much crap to choose from, so little time.
Once again, the critical voting bloc, that is "working class" whites who don't benefit from actual Republican economic policy, feels that it is under threat. That threat is real, not imaginary - it is the loss of White Christian Supremacy. This arouses powerful basic tribal instincts. These instincts take precedence over rationality and even self-preservation. They typically involve the elevation of some quasi-superhuman leader. Loss of this supremacy is felt as catastrophic - it's like losing a war. This kind of thing is probably happening in several places in the world at any given time.
Republicans are fairly open about the "Christian" part, but it is still not acceptable for national politicians to be openly racist. They pretend that the Republican base is agitated about other things, such as the supposed dominance by the liberal economic "elite" or the threat of Marxism.
The rationalizations of the conservative intellectuals have little to do with the movement. It has always been about people responding to dog-whistles, which in the Trump era have become more crude and blatant. He just lies and his followers accept it - there's no intellectual content.
I've wondered for many years whether lots of white Americans, comparing their lifestyles to those of the masses in most other countries, know deep down they've done nothing to deserve the extraordinary wealth and freedom they've enjoyed as the result of two centuries exploitation of a virtual virgin wilderness. They must fear that sooner or later, they're going to be presented with the bill. Evangelicals raised to frame the world in terms of God's earned rewards and punishments would be especially susceptible to this mentality.
Evangelicals don't care. They believe the end times are imminent, so it is God's mandate for them to grab what they can. And if they violate a few commandments along the way, they'll tell you that they are automatically forgiven.
@skeptonomist, +1.
Although these power-hungry nuts disagree over who should get to be Lord God Ruler of the World, they are all in perfect agreement on one thing: They all really, and I mean really, hate women!
I would argue that they've been building towards this for several decades, out of frustration that none of their predictions have come to pass, leading them towards Christofascism.
First, civil rights didn't destroy America. Then legalized abortion failed to bring God's destruction. Porn failed to bring God's anger, too. What really got them riled up was how gay marriage and equality didn't result in another Sodom and Gomorrah. And then a black President! Who brought forth Socialism no less, and our healthcare system didn't collapse!
But under MAGA everything turned up to 11 with Trump's rhetoric calling out immigrants, Muslims, and Blacks.
And in the last 3 years, it's been all about illegal voting and injustice leading us to the point where the far right has embraced a maximalist Christofascism.
The failures of their own prophecies can make some even more deeply dangerous, particularly if they're serious believers in biblical prophecy. They profess a faith that's an inner state of being that only they can access, but that they also believe they can easily be fooled about. On its own terms that faith can have only one worldly proof, namely the end times, the millennium, which is its only intersection with the world people live in.
Most people have a hard time maintaining faith in something that doesn't show itself, or that fails to predict what happens in the world. So in order to demonstrate the truth of the faith they've committed themselves to, they have to create the conditions of millennial prophecy. It's the only thing that can satisfy what they need. So it's people like Pompeo who scare me more than just about all the others.
Right wing think tanks were created to give conservatives something to argue their points with. They realized early on they had nothing, his the court stacking.
....hence the court stacking
(missed the edit window)
I hope the fact that Tyler Cowen thinks Bronze Age Pervert is worth listening to enough to convince Kevin that he doesn't have to engage with his simple minded theories.
I have long regarded Cowen as a lightweight not worth my time, but I had never heard of BAP and had to search out some info on him. Yikes. Before the Internet, one’s exposure to the ravings of lunatics was limited to the occasional chance encounter on the street or a crank letter to the editor on a day with nothing better to print. Now they are all over one of our main sources of information and opinion.
I think there has been a shift in the right wing toward a more overt sadism in the treatment of their opponents and other unfavored groups. It was always there, but now it is actually performative (at least in speech) to a growing fraction of the Right. The suffering of those they disagree with is a pursuit, not just a observation.
As @skeptonomist suggests above there's reality to their realization that they're losing. They've lost young people and they're not getting them back. That's fatal and anyone who's paying attention knows it. So seeing this as an existential, no holds barred fight to the death makes sense.
It's not mental illness. It's not (just) racism. They're not nuts. They're losing their world. I'd fight too.
But for sure they could do a lot of damage, taking everyone else down with them.
The fact that they are dangerous and threatening mentally ill fanatics doesn’t mean we can’t kick their asses. They have paranoid delusions which lead them to threaten violence.
If a lot of what they say sounds like ex-post rationalization, we might consider something Frum wrote in 2018 that particularly struck me then and has stuck with me since: "If conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy." Large segments among them are new to this rejection and are talking themselves into it.
Others have been at it longer, particularly the religio-fascists Kevin points to. Those guys are very practiced, like Mike Johnson, and don't need rallying. They've always had the special inside knowledge and special essence that should give them privilege over the rest of us.
It's the new recruits and converts who need rallying and ratiocination, and that's what this catastrophism provides. Its urgency absolves them from any need to wonder whether in fact they're really so much more special than all the rest of us.
Because to me it's very largely about being more special. When you're special, *you* get to decide what's right. Not those other guys.
This appears to be drawing a false equivalence between intellectual and bowel...
Some of Mike Johnson's great history of complete failure,
https://twitter.com/PeterVroom1/status/1720800150396743937