by Damozel | We have said it before: one characteristic of the far right and those who identify as such is an extreme and dangerous and pitiable level of gullibility. One pitfall of being an authoritarian is that authority figures so often have feet of clay, but authoritarians -- having once gilded an idol in their image -- are compelled to believe any decree emanating from that source. In consequence, they are easily manipulated. Matt Taibbi says:
This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies...which link the protesting “populists” and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.
Actually, they make it look very easy. Which is, as Taibbi says, quite the accomplishment.
And then there's this, which cuts right to the core of the problem.
That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda....
But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit....
A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated. (Taibbiblog)
Yes, because "the base" is not fond of thinking for itself and operates by picking trusted authority figures and going along with whatever they say.
Or, as Larissa Alexandrovna succinctly puts it, "The rich buy the stupid and manufacture a movement."
At The L.A. Times, Matt Cooper says that the tea parties are "steeped in insanity."
And now this. Whip out your Lipton and don your tinfoil hat and join the protest against ... against ... against what exactly?
The original Boston Tea Party was caffeinated by a very simple injustice: American Colonists refused to be taxed by a government that lacked any popular representation. That was remedied a few years later in a heroic struggle that stretched from Concord to Yorktown.
I could be wrong, but I think their major beef is that Obama won and they've otherwise been thoroughly discredited. Pretending to be brave political dissenters taking enormous risks for the sake of a nonprinciple makes them feel better. Of course it is really just more of the same prolonged tantrum we've seen since the election, but at least they get to feel some sense of solidarity with other victims of Obama derangement syndrome.
Though some of them are probably just clueless. They don't know they got a tax break because they don't know how much tax they paid in the past. Their prophets and soothsayers have been telling them that Obama is raising taxes and by God, they can't let in any information to the contrary.
Digby adds, in more ominous vein:
We don't know what these tea bag parties are going to bring tomorrow. It's likely they will be McCain rally freak shows, of which they really are an extension. But if they manage over the next few months to get a coherent message together and the corporate backed front groups can successfully manage them, they could turn into something more troubling --- a right wing populist movement aimed at government. Not good....
I just saw Obama's economic speech. I wish he'd been making it for the past two years.
Yes, me too. The wingnut mouthpieces -- entertaining as they are -- are perhaps on the verge of stirring up some very serious shit, not necessarily intentionally but with reckless disregard for the consequences of what they say and do. We need to see some serious leadership on policy matters. So far, that is not happening.
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Lefty degenerates like Anderson Cooper are having a lot of fun using one of their own practices, "teabagging," which you can look up in the Urban Dictionary, among their partners of the same gender, to describe the honest political exercise of rights by a large segment of the population. If there was any doubt that Anderson the Boy-Child was gay, his insistence on making that joke with David Rodham Gergen last night several times removed said doubt.
Do you and your colleagues on the left think you are mau-mauing enough to really matter? People who pay taxes, instead of parasitizing off govt., have a perfect right to protest the awesome lack of accountability being demonstrated by the tax cheats and earmarkers inside the Beltway.
After all, taxpayers have to pay, and will also suffer the inflation that is bound to ensue when the silliness of this administration comes due --- rule by retarded petty functionaries always has the same results....
Posted by: daveinboca | April 15, 2009 at 06:26 PM