Late night thoughts

This will wander a bit. More than a bit, I expect. Caveat lector.

Just yesterday, I read an exchange in the comments on an item about Rush Limbaugh at Media Matters for America. It began with someone citing what Paul Hackett, the Iraq War vet who narrowly lost election in Ohio for a seat in the House of Representatives, said in response to Limbaugh having called him a "staff puke." (He called Limbaugh a "fatass drug addict.")

If I'm not mistaken[, someone replied], Paul lost. So his points would be important to about nobody. Now if he could only design a better golf ball...... [length of ellipsis as per original]

Someone else came back with

[a]s a resident of the district in which he ran, his comments are important to me. Is this your typical attitude? That the opinions of a slim minority (48%) have no worth at all?

To which the original poster declared

In the political world, yes, they have no worth. Slim minority = lost.

I just found that so typical, almost archetypical. It is precisely the attitude of so many rightwingers - and in this instance I consciously distinguish them from honest conservatives (and there are some), those who take conservative stands because they honestly no matter how wrongly believe them to be the best course, "the greatest good for the greatest number" and all that. But for rightwingers of the sort on display here, the sort who have been in the ascendancy over the past couple of decades, it's about something else entirely.

We usually say that the "something else" is selfishness, a matter of "me first and devil take the hindmost." And there is indeed a good deal of that, but I think there is something underlying it. As here, so very often the attitude becomes "You lost. So shut up. You lost. You LOST! Loser!" For them, it's not about being correct, it's about the winning itself. It's about the power.

This is not a new thought for me. In a letter to a friend more than 10 years ago, I was considering the results of the 1994 Congressional elections. I noted that the actual shift in voting patterns was relatively small, on the order of a few percent, but it was

enough to change enough elections to change Congress - putting the Senate in the Dole-drums and subjecting us to the spectacle of a bunch of Newt-wits stomping around Washington, verbally wiggling their asses in a touchdown taunt, conceitedly smug in their condescension, who seem less excited about what they can do with their new-found power than they are by the simple fact that they have it. It's the power itself that's getting them off, far more than any notions of some good (even for themselves) they might accomplish by wielding it.

I maintain that that, in fact, was a big part of the reason why the "Gingrich Revolution" didn't come off as predicted: While he had a number of wily generals, too many of his troops were snot-nosed egoists more adept at the campaign equivalent of schoolyard taunts than at the actual mechanisms of government and a good deal more interested in strutting than in legislating - fortunately for us.

The shift, I said at the time, was driven by the Perot voters, the people I called the "a'ginners" - that is, whatever it is, they're a'gin it. The GOPpers knew (and still know) how to push their buttons better than the Dummycrats, so they won and have held that advantage since.

But, getting back on the main track here, as our commenting friend above demonstrates, for many ordinary right wingers, the kind we deal with in day-to-day life and in comments on various blogs, the issue comes down to winning. Period. With so little in their political and economic lives under their control, this provides a sense of power, of dominance even. I honestly think that in the '60s these same people would have been on the wild-eyed left fringe rattling on at length about "the workers' revolution" that was coming any day - because then it was the left that was the winning side. You could call it a political version of the Stockholm Syndrome, of achieving a sense of control over your circumstances by identifying with your oppressor - except in this case it's not an oppressor per se, it's just whoever appears to be on top. (I suppose another way to phrase that would be to call them sycophants except in this case their servility makes them feel they have some degree of power and influence rather than actually gaining for themselves any of either.)

Or, since so many of these folks are males, it could be an expression of masculine overcompensation:

Ithaca, NY, August 2 - Threaten a man's masculinity and he will assume more macho attitudes, according to a study by a Cornell University researcher.

"I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq War more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle," said Robb Willer, a sociology doctoral candidate at Cornell. ...

Willer administered a gender identity survey to a sample of male and female Cornell undergraduates in the fall of 2004. Participants were randomly assigned to receive feedback that their responses indicated either a masculine or a feminine identity. While women's responses were unchanged regardless of the feedback they received, men's reactions "were strongly affected by this feedback," Willer said.

"Masculinity-threatened men also reported feeling more ashamed, guilty, upset and hostile than did masculinity-confirmed men," states Willer's report, "Overdoing Gender: Testing the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis." ...

The study produced "the predicted results," he said. "The intention of the study was to explore whether masculine overcompensation exists and where. But the point isn't to suggest these are the only factors that can explain these behaviors. Likewise, there may be a wide variety of other behaviors that could increase when men are concerned about their levels of masculinity."

In a separate study, Willer verified that support for the Iraq War, homophobia and interest in purchasing an SUV were all considered masculine by study participants.

(Thanks to AmericaBlog for the link.)

What I suspect is that we are still seeing a version of the "angry white male" of the 1990s. I said in that same letter quoted above that

Bill Clinton, of all people, expressed it well in a speech on April 8[, 1995]: Referring to middle-aged white men who when they were 20 looked forward to a "good life" of sending their kinds to college followed by a secure retirement, he said "Now they've been working for 15 years without a raise and they think they could be fired at any time. And they go home to dinner and they look across the table at their families and they think they let them down. They think somehow, what did I do wrong? It's pretty easy for people like that to be told by somebody else in the middle of a political campaign with a hot 30-second ad, you didn't do anything wrong, they did it to you."

And who, according to those bastards, are "they?" Intrusive big government. Irresponsible poor people. Environmental elitists/extremists/doomsayers. Selfish minorities. Pushy women. And what is it they "did?" Taxes that take away your money. Laze about on those taxes - your taxes - while you work harder than ever. Environmental laws that take away the job you have. Affirmative action programs that take away the job you deserve.

After noting the economic stagnation of the preceding decades ("Of the six primary ethnic-gender groupings in the US - black, white, and Hispanic men and women - only one of them, white women, has made a clear gain in real median income over the last 20 years. The others have either stagnated or declined."), I wrote that

[p]erhaps never before in our history, certainly never before in this century, has such a large portion of our population (and not just those proverbial angry white guys, either) looked at their children and felt that those children will wind up worse off than they themselves are - felt, that is, like failures.

What has this has done to us? It's made us a little colder, a little harder, a little more inured to others' suffering, and a lot angrier. It's prompted us to regard as "unfair" anything (such as affirmative action) that we don't see as benefitting us, personally and immediately. It's propelled us toward isolation from our own communities, fragmentation of any sense of mutual responsibility, and condemnation of anyone different or "other."

And it made a lot of men, for most of who their sense of self-worth, of value, is strongly wrapped up in their ability to provide for a family (it's said that the worst insult you can hurl at a man is to tell him he'll never amount to anything; whether that should be the worst is irrelevant to the fact that it is), to feel vulnerable, to question themselves and their abilities.

I don't think a lot has changed in that regard in the years since I wrote that. Despite all we hear from Dummocratic Party partisans, the Bill Clinton years were not all that great for the average family, nor have those ensuing been any better. Just as in the '80s, the bulk of the benefits of whatever economic growth we saw went to the rich. For example, based on Census Bureau figures, over the 15-year period from 1988 to 2003, the real median income

- of the poorest fifth of households went up by only 2.8% (and in 2003 was below where it was in 1989).
- of the next fifth went up 5.3% (and in 2003 dropped for the third year in a row).
- of the middle fifth went up 6.9%.
- of the next fifth went up 12%.
- of the richest fifth went up 25%
- of the richest 1% went up 36%.

Put another way, while the median (middle case) household income went up 6.5% over that 15 years, the mean (average) household income went up 16% - meaning that most of the gain came in households with above-median income.

Meanwhile, the percentage of the population living below the official (too low) poverty line has gone essentially nowhere (it was 13.0% in 1988, 12.5% in 2003); ditto for those with an income no more than 125% of the poverty line (17.5% in 1988; 16.9% in 2003) and those "living" on an income no more than 50% of the poverty line, which never dropped below 4.5% and in 2003 stood at 5.3% - essentially the same as it was fifteen years earlier (5.2%). A real shocker as far as I'm concerned is that each year during that time, an average of about 40% of poor people worked and around 10% worked full-time, year-round and still lived in poverty.

What all this means is that, to quote that letter one more time because it remains true, people are coming to believe "that work gets you nowhere and more work gets you more nowhere." And the Cornell study gives us reason to believe that men in particular - and they do seem to be, overall, the most vociferous wingers - are going to have this affect their attitudes toward other topics.

The bottom line, if you will, here, is that with so much seemingly beyond their control - gas prices, the economy, health care, a future for their children, the list of everyday concerns fitting the description is long - people are going to look for what they can control. And dammit, some things may be going to hell but some things can damn well be kept the way they've always been! So no, gays can't get married and yes we're going to wave the flag at every opportunity and no those foreigners can't come here and yes we're going to "protect" the pledge of allegiance and no....

Constant stress turns people in on themselves and away from what someone once called "the deserving stranger." And certainly we've seen enough of that, i.e., stress, over the past few decades.

I'm going to cut myself off here. Digby over at Hullabaloo has a post quite relevant to all these meandering thoughts; I intend to make some comments on it tomorrow as a way of continuing (and perhaps even focusing) my thinking here. Stay tuned. (Or tune out, if you are of the mind.