"What up?"
—Michael Steele
Ever wonder why the scariest caricature of the living dead is a smiling Dick Cheney? Believe me, that is more than a freakish coincidence of genetics.
Ghouls, zombies, vampires and other variants of the undead are the stuff of modern US horror media, threats from within haunting the modern "social psyche." During the so-called Cold War popular horror genres reflected national paranoia of threat from without: alien invaders and giant bugs. Contemporary psychological horror is more apt to be the homegrown sociopath as superman a la Silence of the Lambs than the externally brainwashed fantasy creature of The Manchurian Candidate.
It is no surprise that the threat is seen as from within when one considers the uncanny resemblance of the modern conservative movement to the soulless, brain-eating undead. As already noted, Cheney's pale visage in its familiar grimace-smile would have made a terrifying poster for yet another remake of The Night of the Living Dead. That was before said countenance became cliché.
Unlike the anxiety of the Cold War years, the current apprehension is not a product of government propaganda. It is a deep shudder from within society of dread felt rather than understood, which cannot be expressed even when understood for reasons we will attempt to lay bare. Worse, it seems the trend is to accept the undead and their variants as normal part of society. Which is no surprise, given the length of time people have had to live with the likes of Antonin Scalia and Pat Robertson, among a host of other superstitious zombies.
The word conservative
The central tenet of modern conservatism is a foreign policy based on aggressive and blatant militarism. Certainly militarism is not something new in the US; witness leaders like Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The difference was that the US did not consider it part of its national identity to brazenly dictate terms to the rest of the world.
Moreover, following WWII there had been a movement on the part of the Democrats and the Supreme Court to dismantle local versions of apartheid in the Southern US and force upon the rest of the nation a sort of legal racial equality with an attempt to erase white dominance (this push for equality is a significant factor in defining the term "liberal"). Legal racial equality is not social racial equality, however, and this action caused a strong reaction resulting in movements among disgruntled locals who considered the white race to be the one chosen to rule the US. They were joined by superstitious cliques appalled at the freedom of speech given groups they considered immoral, by which they meant not living in accord with their own chosen interpretation of some form of holy writ, most often the Bible. These local movements were eventually fodder for a global marriage fused by the militarist Ronald Reagan, a president who was an essential pivot in the evolution of a new form of governance for the US. But this comes later in the story.
An influential portion of these militarists are of a particular superstitious persuasion, members of religions who worship the genocidal monstrosity of Moses and Joshua (as opposed to those who worship the later "softer" divinity of the New Testament, another demarcation in the boundary separating liberal versus conservative), mythical Jewish leaders of a war of genocide and ethnic cleansing. It is not difficult to fathom that people who believe that anything one does under the orders of God (the titular name they give their supreme monstrosity) is not only just and right, but in fact holy, can believe that their God-chosen nation is now under holy orders to cleanse the earth of "evil" by violent means. Nor is it difficult to fathom that such people believe, for example, that this thing they call God would preserve its chosen during a nuclear conflagration After all, the human primate is not a rational creature, no matter what the formal academic body of knowledge called Economics would have us believe.
Not all these militarists are influenced by Biblical superstition. A significant portion of them have been inculcated into a secular mythology of the US as leader of the free world, conqueror of Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan. That history shows it was actually the Soviet Red Army that defeated Hitler, almost single-handed, is irrelevant. This myth is of particular significance to those who never served their country, patriots like Reagan and Cheney, the latter a draft-dodger. They need no more excuse to force the US's will upon other nations than this one.
Note that these people are not fiscal conservatives; fiscal conservatism is incompatible with militarism. Militarists spend whatever is necessary to build military dominance to terrify other nations. That a significant portion of this spending is for bluster value is evidenced by the lack of US military success in actual warfare. Consider the fact that when the US went to war in Iraq, its too-few troops were poorly equipped despite the billions spent on "defense." The war machine produced by "defense spending" is not of any particular value to the military in fighting wars; much of the product ends up in the desert "bone-yards" of Arizona or in storage facilities for no wars. A significant portion of the billions is for paper. The real purpose of "defense spending" since Reagan's presidency has been jobs: constant fiscal stimulus (with horrendous overhead).
The first serious modern politician at a Presidential level to openly express militarism was Barry Goldwater. He gained support via his focus on the notion of local control, an expression that Southern racists have used as a codeword for re-institution of apartheid. But his expression of militarism ("extremism in defense of liberty is no vice") cost him the election to Johnson. Of course, it was Johnson who escalated the conflict in Vietnam after winning election by implying Goldwater would nuke North Vietnam, among other countries. Perhaps Johnson was not far off, given the nuclear inclinations of Goldwater's incarnation as VP in Bush the Younger's regime. The irony that Goldwater's "liberty" be extended outside the US by the new conservatives who would force freedom and liberty ("Democracy") on other nations at gunpoint would not be lost on Goldwater.
The conservatives who form the militarist movement are mostly called social conservatives. That they sometimes gather into their fold people who consider themselves libertarians or fiscal conservatives is irrational, but few humans are given to or capable of careful logical consideration. (There is also the problem of a "two-party system" which allows little realistic choice.) In fact, many of them are opposed to logic or ratiocination, and openly cry out for what can only be called anti-rationality. This is clear from contemporary confusion of scientific thought with legal thought (there is no court of science) or with religion. Another sort of derangement becoming common, especially in the media, is typified by the megalomania of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who believes in his Pope-like infallibility as a unique supernatural interpreter of the Constitution guided by the Holy Founding Fathers. (The same phenomenon occurs within elements of the libertarian movement, but unlike Ron Paul, most of the more vocal bozos in the "teabag parties" are ignorant of the Constitution and its history. Their version of this document and their history of its adoption, which denies the myriad compromises required to get it approved, exists only in their imaginations.) This sort of insanity has become an embedded part of the conservative movement's claim to be the only group that can pick truly "unbiased" justices for the Supreme Court. The mania is apparent when one listens to the arguments made by supporters of particular political ideology, no matter what ilk, standing reason on its head to play a game of gotcha. This sophistry is a significant part of the popular media portrayal of legal proceedings. However, it is only the conservatives who claim to be led by supernatural, usually divine, guidance.
Besides the lack of rational argument there is the substitution of ideological belief for factual evidence. History is cast aside as lies or propaganda if it is not in accord with the world-view of the ideologue. This is independent of the persuasion, but it is currently a form of mass hysteria among the so-called social conservatives. In fact, it may be their hallmark. For example, I have an old friend who claims to be a libertarian but who prefers Republicans to Democrats because they spend less money. He disregards the fact that under Reagan the US national debt doubled and the US became a net debtor nation for the first time. He claims that Reagan's tax cuts brought in more revenue, even though the budget deficits under Reagan were the most massive in modern times before Bush the Younger. He denies the reality that Bill Clinton zeroed the budget deficit, since the fact that a Democrat could be more fiscally conservative than a Republican is outside his Weltanschauung. (The proof, for those who understand government finance, is that the Clinton Treasury was able to halt sales of long term paper and considered halting sales of all debt instruments, a move considered unwise for reasons of mechanization should some new administration once again begin printing money, which was exactly what Bush the Younger did. But in other words, Clinton was able to cease printing money.) Nor is such delusion isolated. It is a condition among what one would like to call otherwise reasonable people, but that would be a mistake given the irrational decisions made by these people in their everyday lives.
In fact, what is occurring is that human primates of the US, and perhaps the world, are forming what might be called clots of irrationality in which their collective visions of reality are at odds not only with other clots, but with events occurring around them that are open to objective inspection. For example, my friend stated that all mutual funds are Madoff-schemes; that if the mortgage on your home is higher than the current market value you ought to let it go to foreclosure because you could easily buy a lower priced home with a new loan; that the stock market was still at its lows of March 2009 though the DOW had climbed to 10,000 (not to mention the foreign exchanges like the Bovespa); that if you have a strong legal case against a corporation, no matter the value of the suit settlement, lawyers would line up to take the case because they would be paid their enormous fees as part of the court costs (there is no general legal provision for the court to pay a lawyer's fees for the winner or the loser). Those were among his less absurd assertions. It became pointless to argue with him since he would make any argument, no matter reality. Whether or not that was a conscious decision or due to some external problem like brain damage, since he seemed to be a rational human at one time, is not clear. But it is scary.
Anti-rationality and legal sophistry are apparent when one witnesses people redefining scientific theory to suit their arguments against that theory. A brother-in-law of mine once asked me, If we evolved from apes, why are they still here? Of course, the question makes no sense in terms of evolution. But I have witnessed arguments in which an individual with no idea of what comprises a specific scientific theory tells someone who specializes in that theory and made contributions to that theory, what the theory comprises. When the expert points out the incorrectness of the assumptions regarding the theory, the expert is told that he does not understand the theory. Of course, this allows the people arguing against the theory to reformulate the debate to their advantage. It is the classic straw man argument. This has become the method most used by the conservatives and unfortunately, it will work because few people are able to recognize the fallacy of such arguments. As when someone who knew nothing about mathematics told me that the infinite series with nth term 1/n converges. I gave a proof that it did not, but no one witnessing the argument could determine who was right since they were not capable of the requisite logical thought.
W. H. McNeill's ambitious history The Rise of the West makes the point that as societies disintegrate they lose faith in their traditional values and their authority figures, seeking out new forms of belief and new authority figures. The human primate is at base a superstitious creature, so this is not unexpected. Clearly it is happening within the West, where dissatisfaction with science has risen to new heights even as the primate love for technological toys grows. I believe that this is part of the phenomenon of the rise of the irrational conservatism discussed above. My friend, trained in mathematics, has turned his back on all scientific and mathematical argument. Nor is he a singleton. I have had similar experiences dating back to the late 1990s with people trained in science or mathematics or both. Some of them were guided by religious superstition, but many of them were guided by secular superstition that is not well-defined. Often it is some belief in ideas of Adam Smith that Smith never voiced, a misunderstanding of Smith, or a belief in Hayek and the Austrian school of economics which is a kind of secular religion. Sometimes it is fundamentalist belief in some sort of rugged individualism or libertarian anarchy (often tied to the Austrian school of economic religion), ironically by people who exist because of social institutions and inventions or who survive on government funding of some kind. My libertarian friends who work for the government fail to see the irony of their positions.
The purpose here is not to attempt to determine why these absurd reactions are occurring now, but instead to take a global view with historical hindsight in order to forecast their potential effects.
