Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 7

Oh, Hank!

Chapter 8

The John Galt Line

In this chapter a train goes through a tunnel.

But let's start at the beginning. Our story resumes with a conversation between Eddie Willers, who at Dagny's command is keeping her seat warm as Vice President of Taggart Industries, and a nameless worker. Because Rand is utterly uninterested in anything not Ubermensch-ish she does not bother give us the worker's side of the conversation. Instead we have a nearly two page monologue in which Eddie fawns over Dagny and celebrates her accomplishments and flair. Rand said that Dagny is herself, although more healthy and energetic, and Rand doesn't miss a chance to wallow in self-glorification. A good writer (or a good person) would show flaws as well as good traits to humanize her characters but Rand was neither. Rand needed to glorify the few at the expense of everyone else; her bad guys are uniformly repulsive and wretched and her good guys are flawless. Rand's writing began as an escape into a happier world of imagination but over time hardened into a mean-spirited attack on everyone who refused to play along with Rand's inflated views of herself.

Her greatest pleasure was inventing plots. And when the plot had been put into words, she discovered the heady feeling of living in the world of her own creation. She experienced the joy of creating a world more interesting than the world around her, of creating purposes more important than the purposes around her, of creating characters more admirable and heroic than the people around her. She was discovering, without yet the words to name it, the Aristotelian principle that the fiction writer creates the world "as it might be and ought to be."

When Rand inserted herself into her stories she, too, became greater, more important, and more interesting than anyone else. Rand Dagny takes a moment to rest in her new office, two nearly empty rooms in an abandoned building next to her old office.

[Dagny] glanced at a jagged crack on the wall of her office. She heard no sound. She knew she was alone in the ruins of a building. It seemed as if she were alone in the city. She felt an emotion held back for years; a loneliness much beyond this moment, beyond the silence of the room and the wet, glistening, emptiness of he street, the loneliness of a gray wasteland where nothing was worth reaching; the loneliness of her childhood.

...

She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the windowpane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

Dagny feels her body longing for someone to give her the same kind of satisfaction and joy that her work gives her. As she rubs against her desk (yes, you read that correctly), she longs for a man who can give her that kind of satisfaction. A shadow falls across the room; a man disappears into the shadows. Who could it have been? Francisco D'Anconia warned her than John Galt would come for her but he also warned her that he would behave strangely, which Dagny also ignored. She is left to wonder for another 800 pages.

Hank Reardon is faring better than Dagny. Despite the anguish of being forced to sign over most of his industries he is determined to succeed. His Reardon Metal bridge is rising and that gives him the energy to soldier on. He meets Eddie at his hotel which, despite the overall decrepitude of the city, manages to serve Reardon orange juice over crushed ice on a crisp, white tablecloth. Rand pays no attention to consistency or reality; her half-dead city has virtually no street crime and Dagny walks through the city in the middle of the night, dressed to the nines, and nobody accosts her. The city is falling apart when Rand wants it to and operates efficiently when she doesn't want it to. Reardon tells Eddie that all will be well, and to not worry about the scum.

Reardon laughed. "Eddie, what do we care about people like [Jim Taggart]?" We're driving an express, and they're riding on the roof, making a lot of noise about being leaders. Why should we care? We have enough power to carry them along--haven't we?"

Ayn Rand is balm to the soul of authoritarian leaders, who believe that rules are for the little people. But Rand's characters are stiff with a kind of honor; they don't mind supporting the scum as long as the scum leaves them alone. They loathe unearned honor or respect and glorify both natural ability and ability gained through hard work. Libertarians, that is authoritarian wanna-be leaders, try to claim superior status without actual living up to that superiority. Bob Altemeyer describes (pdf)  these "social dominators."

They thrill to power in and of itself. They want to control others, period. (Make that, “exclamation mark!”) Their name says it all. And they come bundled with a shock of nasty attitudes that completes the package.

Social dominance scores correlate very strongly with [...] answers to the Power Mad scale. High scorers are inclined to be intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful They scorn such noble acts as helping others, and being kind, charitable, and forgiving. Instead they would rather be feared than loved, and be viewed as mean, pitiless, and vengeful. They love power, including the power to hurt in their drive to the top. Authoritarian followers do not feel this way because they seldom have such a drive to start with.

[...]

In a similar vein, remember those “group cohesiveness” items in chapter 3, such as, “For any group to succeed, all its members have to give it their complete loyalty.” We saw that authoritarian followers endorse such sentiments. But social dominators do not. Oh sure, they want their followers to be super loyal to the group they lead. But they themselves are not really in it so much for the group or its cause, but more for themselves. It’s all about them, not about a higher purpose. If trouble arises, don’t be surprised if they start playing “Every man for himself” and even sell out the group to save their own skin.

[...]

Empathy. Here’s an easy one. How empathetic, how compassionate do you think dominators are? Not very, right? You got it, for they agree with statements such as “I don’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for people less fortunate than me,” and “I have a ‘tough’ attitude toward people having difficulty: ‘That’s their problem, not mine.’” And they disagree with, “I feel very sorry for people who are treated unfairly” and “I have a lot of compassion for people who have gotten the bad breaks in life.” For high social dominators “sympathy” indeed falls, as the saying goes, between “ship” and “syphilis” in the dictionary. (Well, maybe that’s not the exact saying, but this is a family web-site.)

Altemeyer says that social dominators don't believe in equality.

Given all of this, do you really believe the social dominator who says people should have to earn their success in life? He’s quite willing to let the children of the rich get rich merely through inheritance. Do you trust him when he says he’s in favor of a level playing field? He’s against programs that would give the disadvantaged a better chance. Does he really believe the poor can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or is he content to let them face an uphill struggle that very few can overcome? It doesn’t bother the social dominator that masses of people are poor. That’s their tough luck. And some racial groups are just naturally inferior to others, he says. Justice should not be applied equally to all. The rich and powerful should have advantages in court, even if that completely violates the concept of justice. Who cares if prejudice plays a role in the justice system? He certainly doesn’t. The “right people” should have more votes than everybody else in elections. And so on.

If you stare deeply into the souls of social dominators, they believe “equality” is a sucker word. Only fools believe in it, they say. And if people took equality seriously, if society did try to provide equal opportunity for all, and if the playing field really were made level so that bootstraps could be pulled up and multitudes of lives bettered, the social dominator knows he would get less. And he very much dislikes that notion. He says so.

This is how social dominators can tell us that insider trading is no big deal, that we live in a meritocracy instead of a country with third-world levels of economic inequality, and that if workers are permitted to retire instead of working until they die, they will get lazy and greedy. They genuinely believe that rules are for the little people and do not hesitate to take advantage of every opportunity for personal profit while lecturing the poor on morality and humility.  Some sheep are a little smarter than others, however, so the elite and their servants dress up their greed and callousness with pretty bows and ribbons, calling them a philosophy and their adherents people of principle. Think tanks are formed, magazines are financed, fellowships are handed out with great ceremony, large prizes are awarded. But in the end it's nothing but propaganda to disguise greed and exploitation.

In Atlas Shrugged, however, it is the scum and lice who collaborate on propaganda that attacks the Ubermensch. Libertarians routinely use tactics that their heroes looked upon with disdain and disgust, such as making excuses for failure and using propaganda.  The tactics used to fight Reardon are very familiar to those who read libertarian and conservative propaganda. Facts are useless, the people are told. Magazines, newspapers, pundits and radio hosts all spread the message that Reardon metal is unsafe. The unions refuse to let their men work on the John Galt Line so Dagny calls for volunteers, who line up for the honor of working for her. When the work is nearly completed, Dagny calls a press conference.

The reporters who came to the press conference in the offices of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audiences for some public figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in any combination they pleased, so long as the words did not fall into a sequence saying something specific.

Substitute "corporate good" for "public good" and you will have every Koch or Bradley-fed libertarian magazine that exists. The newspapermen are shocked that Dagny and Reardon state they are in business to make money; in RandLand money is a dirty word. Dagny invites everyone to witness the first train run and tells them that she (and Reardon) will be riding along. When the day arrives she is swept away with joy at her success, the only joy in life, according to Rand.

Only if one feels immensely important, she had told [Reardon], can one feel truly light. Whatever the train's run would men to others, for the two of them their own persons were this day's sole meaning. Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find. It was as if, across the platform, they said it to each other.

...

She looked at the crowd , and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.

Rand describes how the train's crew gathered to make this first run to Denver and Ellis Wyatt's oil fields, with contemptuous, indifferent looks of superiority at the rabble. For Rand, these qualities are both natural and right; who could not feel contemptuous, indifferent and superior when looking at scum? It's no more than they deserve for their inferiority. The newsmen are caught up in the excitement despite themselves; the sight of all that superiority makes them wish to be superior as well. As the train flashes across the countryside at 100 mph, Dagny sees old men and boys lining the track, guarding it against sabotage. The stations they pass are covered in decorations as railwaymen celebrates Dagny's great accomplishment and Ellis Wyatt is there to help her down when they make their triumphant arrival. He welcomes them to his home and that night she and Reardon have sex in the spirit of mutual triumph and contempt.

It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body; she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers.... He was not smiling; his face was tight, it was the face of an enemy; he jerk her head and caught her mouth again, as if he were inflicting a wound.

She felt him trembling and she thought that this was the kind of cry she had wanted to tear from him-this surrender through the shreds of his tortured resistance. Yet she knew, at the same time, that the triumph was his, that her laughter was her tribute to him, that her defiance was submission, that the purpose of all of her violent strength was only to make his victory the greater-he was holding her body against his, as if stressing his wish to let her know that she was now only a tool for the satisfaction of his desire-and his victory, she knew, was her wish to let him reduce her to that. Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom-that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service-and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have.

Reardon tears off Dagny's clothes and give her more looks of contempt. Dagny gladly gives herself to him and rejoices that he takes what he wants, which is the only way for proper Ubermenschen to live.

... [T]hey had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal.

The world and its people exist to fulfill the needs of the Special, and when the lice and scum forget that, it is time for them to be eliminated.

Personal History Lesson

This is a segment of Glenn Beck's January 15, 2008 interview with Jonah Goldberg.

GOLDBERG: Well, at first the phrase Liberal Fascism as you know, H.G. Wells was arguably the most popular liberal/Progressive intellectual and English speaking language in the first half of this 20th century, hugely influential socialist, founding member -- or member of the Fabian socialists, met with FDR in the Oval Office --

GLENN: Hang on. Jonah, I have to tell you. I feel like the dumbest guy in the world. I really do. What's so amazing, this shows us how our educational system has failed us. While I was on vacation over the holiday, I found out about the Fabian movement. I had never even heard of it. You want to talk about something that is unbelievably frightening in today's world. It describes what we're doing now, who our politicians are now.

GOLDBERG: These global elites, H2L is a global fascism where we seceded our sovereignty, our global control to what he called a world brain and that's what you see in things like the UN, all these places where, you know, the Supreme Court today is, you know, the liberals in the Supreme Court are invoking foreign laws to figure out what our Constitution means, and it is this sort of elitist, aristocratic, nondemocratic, bureaucratic management by the chosen sort of master brains of the globe that, you know, Bill Clinton, this global Clinton initiative and all these sort of things, it's a big part of what they are trying to do.

GLENN: When Hillary Clinton first said -- and it was in one of the debates. They said, are you a liberal? She said, no, because that means big government, et cetera, et cetera. She said, I like to refer to myself as a Progressive in the early -- because it invokes a real American feel, the Progressives of the early 20th century. That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

GOLDBERG: That was great and that was a classic Clintonism because what she did there was -- it's like when she talks about her family values, upbringing in Illinois and being a conservative girl. She wants credit for the things she used to believe even though she doesn't believe them anymore. And the same thing with this Progressive thing. She says, oh, well, liberal means big government and I'm not for that; that's why I call myself a Progressive. Well, the Progressives were the original big government people.

GLENN: Right. They were the ones who brought us prohibition and the income tax and everything else.

GOLDBERG: You know, look. When people say, oh, when I argue that Progressives were specific -- and one of the reasons I do that is because the Progressives were in large numbers openly pro Mussolini in the 1920s. This is before Naziism. They liked what Mussolini was doing. But when I say this, you know, a lot of liberals will say, how can you say that? You know, fascism means racism. Well, in fact, it doesn't. Naziism means racism. Fascism doesn't mean racism. But if you want to define it by racism, the Progressives were unrelentingly racist. You know, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, her whole agenda was to keep the inferior races from overbreeding. She spoke to a rally at the KKK in the late 1920s. All of the Progressives were deep seated believers in one form or another of eugenics. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the liberal saint of the Supreme Court, he considered the first and primary goal of public policy to build a race, not a state, not a nation. A race. He was a huge believer in eugenics. The New Republic which openly supported Mussolini in the 1920s also bought entirely into the eugenics movement. And all of this stuff remains like the crazy aunts in your attic no one talks about, it informs the spirit of Progressivism today which is now liberalism.

GLENN: Okay. So Jonah, because my eyes are starting to be opened, I look at this stuff and honestly when I first read over the holiday about Fabianism, I had to get to the Internet right away because I thought, there is no way this stuff is true because there's no way I didn't learn this. There's no way I haven't heard this. This has got to be fringe, this has to be -- this is not what I'm reading. Because I was reading a fringe book. And then I go to the Internet and I look it up and I see H. G. Wells, I see all these people. The stuff that George Bernard Shaw has said is phenomenal.

GOLDBERG: I've argued this for years, I've never heard a good rebuttal. I think he was the most evil intellectual in the English speaking world.

GLENN: Have you seen the phrase that he said where you don't have a right to be -- you must be a useful member of society and you must eat and if we can't force you to eat and we can't force you to be a useful member of society, then we can gently and humanely kill you?

GOLDBERG: Oh, yeah. George Bernard Shaw like many of the Fabian socialists was very keen on gas chambers. The idea that this was something the Nazis thought of is simply not true. There are a huge number of socialist intellectuals who want to send the inferior stocks, the lower classes and the rest of the undesirables off to gas chambers, hang them from the nearest lamp post, all of that kind of stuff.

GLENN: But it's all friendly. It's all because it's for the good of society. It's for the good of all of us. It is fascism with a happy face.

GOLDBERG: That's right. Here's my favorite quote -- sorry to interrupt but I mean, I think you'll get it. Hillary Clinton said in a speech in 1996, a major address, you know, that was written in advance. She used this line and similar circumstances elsewhere. But she says we as a country need to move beyond the idea that there's anything, there's any such thing as someone else's child. Now, I'm sorry. My child is my child and my wife's child, maybe her child and my child, but it is not the State's child, it is not the collective child, it is not the community's child. I'm glad for their help sometimes when necessary, but the idea that our children aren't our own is the fundamental driving impulse of all of the isms of the left, progressivism, fascism, Naziism, communism. All of them sought to crack the outer shell of the nuclear family and get control of the children. Woodrow Wilson says the chief job of an educator is to make -- and he says this to parents -- your children as little like you as possible. That is the agenda and that is still the agenda that we have today.

GLENN: Jonah, I haven't gotten to the end of the book where you do talk a little bit about Hillary Clinton and everybody else. Do you go into Barack Obama or anybody else on the left? Do you --

GOLDBERG: I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. I've been locked in a basement for four years working on this. So I get a little hyper. I mention Barack Obama briefly because he has the same influence as Hillary, a very radical guy who can get over the fact that he is a hero of the left and calls himself a man of the left, speaks about the need for violence, the confrontation and destroying the classes and all that kind of stuff. So I mention that briefly. But you see some of this in Barack Obama as well. And I think Barack Obama is a decent guy, he is not an evil person, I'm not using fascist the way the left does to simply say evil, evil, evil. Barack Obama I think is an honorable and decent guy, but he subscribes to this cult of unity, this idea of that if we just all join hands and march toward the sunny uplands of history and buy each other a Coke, everything will be solved. And that was the same with Hitler, that was the idea of leaders of men in Woodrow Wilson, this idea that we just rally around the spiritual fresh of one man of the nation, all our problems will be redeemed.

GLENN: Jonah Goldberg, I would like to talk to you off the air because I would like to develop a series for the television show and we can break this up, your book up in several different pieces over several different days. Every America needs to read your book. It is absolutely phenomenal. You will understand where we are, who is leading us, where it has come from. It is just a fantastic book and I can't thank you enough for writing it.
[my bold]

GOLDBERG: Glenn, I can't thank you enough for the support. Books need friends and you are great friend to have. GLENN: Thanks very much. Jonah Goldberg. The name of the book is Liberal Fascism. Please, please pick it up.

(Evidently Jonah has been reading Michael Crichton.)

It is the authoritarian struggle for control over others, beginning with your children. The liberals say that we have choices, while the conservatives demand that their children be like themselves. Authoritarians don't fear a cult of unity; that is their goal. They fear choices and change. They fear rejection and pain for disobeying their authorities--God, the priest, Mom and Dad.

A child can't live with rejection from his parents. He closes off his emotions, destroying any empathy that would otherwise develop. But he still has the same emotional needs for love and acceptance so he looks elsewhere for them. However nothing can replace his parents' love, so he is forced to either act out to make them to love him, cling even harder to the substitutes he has, or restlessly moving from one authority to another, looking for someone or something that will give him what he needs. He never questions the source of his patriotism or religious devotion or obsessive relationships and cannot tolerate anyone else doing so.

For a lot of people, 9/11 provided something that was missing from their lives. They finally had a reason for their vague feelings of persecution, mistreatment, neglect, isolation, fear and pain. They gained a sense of belonging, an identity and purpose. It was a godsend and they long for more attacks. It's not about the terrorists and the fascists and the eugenicists. It's about them.

We Are All Victims Now

The little shop of horrors we call The Corner is obsessively discussing how Palin's abrupt quitting will benefit her in her future presidential run. These geniuses are utterly incapable of seeing the truth because the truth would reflect badly on them. They cheered and praised and supported a woman who was patently under qualified, and through sheer determination, they force the facts to support their prejudices and vanities.

Victor/Victoria Davis Hanson:

Conventional wisdom suggests that short-term the Palin decision was unwise— e.g., "quitter," unpredictable, sulking, etc.

[snip]

In other words, it doesn't matter that much what critics say, but — should she pursue politics — only what she does with her newfound time, especially if she travels widely, studies foreign policy, and helps galvanize the party base.

In the long run, she can lecture, earn a good income through speaking, develop a coterie of advisers and supporters, take care of her family, not have the constant political warring on all flanks, and invest time in reflecting and studying issues, visit the country, meet leaders, etc. She's not looking at 2012; but in eight years by 2016 she will be far more savvy, still young, and far more experienced. It matters not all that the Left writes her off as daffy, since they were going to do that whatever she did; the key is whether she convinces conservatives in eight year of travel and reflection that she's a charismatic Margaret Thatcher type heavyweight.

Kathryn "Prime of Miss Jean" Lopez:

Rather than just be a celebrity, this could be a real opportunity for her to show us her stuff — what's important to her, what she wants people to know about her, why we should pay attention to her, why we should consider her for the highest office in the land (after already gone with the cool dude with little national electoral experience — though in his case it was little experience, period). To get people to know her for something more than being Sarah!

I wouldn't be shocked though, if Palin on the National Scene, Act II, starts out low key, with some downtime. She needs to figure out what her voice is, where and how she can shine, and, most importantly, how she and her family can survive it and even flourish in the brutal world of politics. There's no question she has a gift. Now's the time to figure out how to be prudent with it.

Steve Hayward:

This could be, as Bill Kristol suggests, part of a risky but shrewd long game, not for a run in 2012, but way off in 2016 or 2020. Some folks have mentioned Nixon, rehabilitating himself in the 1960s, and skipping the 1964 election. She may have the self-awareness that she's taken big hits below the waterline, and that her best course is the patient rebuilding of her political life over a decade rather than the next two election cycles. Now she'll have the time to read and study and cultivate wider portfolio as Jonah and others have suggested. But even if she wants to run in 2012, it is certainly the case that it is hard to be a player on the national stage while being governor of Alaska since it is so remote, even in the jet age. (It take longer to get to Alaska than Europe from the east coast and midwest.) If so, she should say this openly. Make a virtue out of it.

Then, too, I wonder, and am slightly hopeful in fact, that she is indeed doing this for authentic family reasons. Political life is hell on decent family life. I have a hard time thinking of a single politician, at any level, who has a happy family life. Kids are usually a mess; non-messed up kids are the rare exception. Whenever I talk to someone about whether to run for any office, that's the first and last aspect I bring up. You shouldn't do it until your kids are grown or off to college is my opinion. This might really be a case of where she has reckoned the cost to her family of near-term political ambition, and chosen her family. Good for her if so.

Other members of the corner are less confident but still see Palin's move as advantageous to her eventually. They pay very little attention to rumors of ethics investigations and seem perfectly happy to accept any reason Palin gives them, no matter how illogical or rambling. Any leader will do for an authoritarian, and Palin can be easily replaced with somebody--anybody--else. Palin might be even more useful as a martyr than as an actual candidate. Mark Steyn:

Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it'll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You've got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who's given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.

Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to - what's the word? - "empathize"? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you'd have to turn into under that scenario?

Poor, poor Palin, forced to parade her pregnant daughter and special-needs baby before the public as instant, photographic proof of her fundamentalist bona fides. How could the public do that to her? She's a victim, just as they are all victims, under constant attack by society. Helpless and weak, needing guns and police and armies to save them from the bad men who live in the shadows.

Frightened children, who would do or say anything to keep lying their comfortable, soothing lies.

Move Over, Alan Quatermain

Good God. I am in awe of this article. It's awesome. It just kicks ass.

To explain: We know Megan McArdle worships the rich. She sees herself as an authoritarian leader, one of the elite, and is unstinting in her support of their actions, no matter how venal, deadly, or just plain stupid. We also know she is not rich herself although she grew up surrounded by rich people, and therefore must be content with being a follower. If you are not rich but you support them you must justify this action to yourself; otherwise you're just some envious schmuck who watches E! to find out what kind of phone Paris Hilton is using. We also know from Stanley Milgrim that many people only need permission from an authority to do what they already want to do. And this morning, I hit paydirt.

[yap]

Even those who think wealth is good (or at least harmless) often implicitly suggest that the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of moral goals are separate questions. They would do well to read Benjamin Friedman's The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. The author, a professor of political economy at Harvard, has written an economic tome that is accessible to the average reader without failing to offer something new to specialists as well: a compelling argument that rising incomes make us not just richer people, but better ones.

[yap yap]

Economists have long known that what they call the “wealth effect” can stimulate spending: If people feel richer because the value of their home or stock portfolio has gone up, or because they think their income is likely to rise in the future, they will loosen up and spend more. Friedman suggests that people don’t merely become more willing to treat themselves to home entertainment systems and $4 cups of coffee as their wealth grows; they also become more generous to others. “With rising incomes,” he says, “more people become willing to donate time and money. And among those who do so, rising incomes also allow people to feel able to do more.”


But direct charity is only one of the ways we become more generous. Even more important is the tolerance that growing wealth brings for competition from others. There is a growing recognition that trade is a vastly more effective way to reduce global poverty than foreign aid; even Oxfam, a reliably left-wing nongovernmental organization, has jumped on the free trade bandwagon with a campaign against agricultural subsidies. Better still, trade benefits domestic consumers. Yet progress on that front is nearly impossible unless economic prosperity is rising fast enough to ease the fears of those who are threatened by a more open market.

Here's McArdle's justification for wealth worship: People with more money donate more money, and free trade helps the poor much more than actual, you know, help.

Damn! I feel like I've found the map to King Solomon's Mines, if his mines were huge, empty cavities filled with greed and vanity instead of gold and pearls.

They're Coming To Get You

Let's talk about victimization.

Why would the right, even when they controlled every venue of power in the land, consider themselves victims? Why do Christians think they are persecuted and hunted, when they are the biggest religious group in the country? Why do white male Republicans complain about being left out of the power structure and claim to be under attack?

It makes no logical sense whatsoever. We know many of them are sincere in their feelings of oppression and victimization. They genuinely feel they are being suppressed, ignored and persecuted despite all evidence to the contrary. Why?

Maybe because they were oppressed and victimized. Authoritarian parents (you knew that was coming, right?) do demand that their children sacrifice and suppress themselves, accepting their parents' definition of them, their parents' values, goals, and beliefs. This is not something most children can accept. They love their parents and want to believe their parents love them back. They would do anything to please them. But deep inside they are resentful of what they were forced to give up, and hurt and angry at the abusive insistence on repression and control. We must have someone to love. It's almost more important that being loved by someone. We may have been rejected, abused, manipulated and controlled, but we cannot stop loving our mother and father. We need that love, and rarely can admit that it was never there. We will not, except under the most extreme of circumstances, admit that our parents didn't love us for what we were, preferring to become a pale copy of them instead of finding out our true nature.

It's a silly thing, but look at this review of Twilight at the Corner. I assume that a Corner reviewer will push conservative "morals" and cliches, but this person takes resentment and victimization to heights seldom seen outside of a junior high school.

We have fully reversed the symbolism of [Bram] Stoker’s vampire, who represented a demonic assault on a virtuous community. Today’s vampire is the hip Other, and the community around him is either bungling, intolerant, or simply a source of comedic relief (as in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Lost Boys, and Fright Night, for example). The modern vampire is in touch with his sexuality, but the community suppresses it. The modern vampire is coming to take away your girlfriend, and she kind of likes it. The modern vampire is the guy you wish you had been in high school, or the guy you wish you’d dated in high school, and Meyer has turned that into gold.

The trouble with this evolution is that fictional monsters serve a valuable cultural purpose. They remind us that we live in communities, and that our communities must be defended from those who would rend them asunder. Though he is no conservative ideologue, Stephen King always seemed to fathom this intuitively. His stories and books featuring vampires made them evil through and through. The difference between his Salem’s Lot and Stoker’s Dracula is that King is also a bit of a dystopian, so while the community in Stoker’s novel worked together in the end to stop the menace, King lets the community fall. Still, he’s wise enough to know that creatures lacking in fundamental attributes of humanity don’t make for good neighbors.

By inverting the traditional vampire tale, so that the community is predatory and the monster an object of empathy if not admiration, we have found one more avenue along which to push the tired idea that community is, rather than a source of life and happiness, a locus of oppression. The Twilight series simply carries our modern love affair with the undead to its natural conclusion; the lovelorn vampire and the object of his infatuation get married and make a baby.

I’m all for multiculturalism, but this is too much. As Freud is supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Likewise, sometimes the Other isn’t a cool countercultural rebel who puts a thrill up your leg, he is a monster who wants to suck your blood or, if he is technologically savvy and has a religious ax to grind, blow up your kids’ school bus. I’m not worried that the modern vampire movie will lead filmgoers to agitate for reconciliation with Osama bin Laden just because the terror master of 9/11 is also pale, has a funny accent, lives in a cave, and is a bloodthirsty egomaniac. But I do think there is value in entertainment that draws a clear line between good and evil.

While many parents are fine with having their youngsters read the Twilight series and watch the accompanying movies, I think there might be some merit in recent fare like the horrifically bloody (and financially less successful) Thirty Days of Night, in which vampires descend on a remote town in Alaska once they know daylight won’t return for a month. These creatures devour throats with viciousness, and the few townspeople who survive are saved only by the voluntary self-sacrifice of their leader. On the surface, Twilight might be more suitable for preteens, but maybe they could use reminding that creatures that prey on communities don’t often make cool boyfriends. Because there are monsters, Virginia, and sometimes they just need killing.

It's cute the way he insinuates vampires are liberals and also terrorists. The man has a sledgehammer touch with words. The author, Tony Woodlief, knows his audience and what they want, and gives it to them. A liberal, I mean a vampire, is a sexual being with unusual tastes. He'll take your girlfriend because he's cool and you're not. The community suppresses its members' sexuality but the liberal rejects the community and does what he or she wants. They don't listen to others tell them what is good or bad; they decide for themselves. That is especially frightening to the authoritarian. If nobody tells you what is right or wrong, how will you know? You can't depend on your own knowledge of right and wrong because that was taken from you. You parents told you what was right and what was wrong and if you ignored them or even disagreed with them you were punished. You know that sometimes they were wrong but you refuse to let yourself break away from your parents. You need their love and you need them to love you. [Correction: You need their love and you need to love them.] So now you are never quite sure what is wrong and what is right. You can't trust your own opinion because your parents said you were wrong to question religious teachings or your country's actions, or your parents' demands. You don't trust yourself to make a right decision. Without laws and God, people would be evil and do bad things, just like your parents said.

Poor guy. He can't watch Twilight without feeling angry at beautiful, popular Edward who wins the girl's absolute acceptance and besotted love. He can't watch True Blood without thinking that the vampires deserve to be hated and hunted for wanting to live out in the open and stop hiding in the shadows. And when he sees the townspeople ripped to pieces by the mostly unseen but constantly terrifying vampires in Thirty Days of Night, he gets grim satisfaction in seeing his nightmares come to life, proof at last that he is, indeed, the victim in this world, and never the monster.

The Corporate States Of America

Rich people came to this country and took what it had. They sold it to others and became richer. When the free goods were used up they turned to theft to relive the rush of getting more and more. That money is disappearing as well. When the rich are done they will not be able to regain that rush and will have to find another way to satisfy that elusive thrill. Since they have all the money and power they will be able to choose the type of thrill. There is more than one way of feeling alive--there is also the power over life and death. Think of Rome.

They are driven to fill the emptiness inside because they are hollow men and women, devoid of self. Their true self was taken from them, usually by their parents. Their self was smothered to make way for the self their parents insisted they become. Authoritarian adults demand that their children adhere to the pattern set down by their own parents, a never-ending chain of repression and control. That emptiness and self-denial can't be filled up with religion or politics or material possessions, cannot be ignored, cannot be stopped. The authoritarian, depending on the strength of his repression, must seek out something to fill the void and will not stop unless he or she is forced to stop.

And so here we are, in the twilight of our innocence, insisting that we are children and must obey. The rich rule because they must. The poor obey because they must. It doesn't even seem to occur to most of them that there is another way. A way called "letting go." Let go of the need, of the exchange of obedience for love. Let go of the need to be special, to fill the void, to hold on to the void because you think there is nothing else. Let go, and fill the void with the person you want and need and choose to be.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

Okay, let's go over this again.

People raise their kids with callousness and cruelty because that is all they know. The kids grow up feeling afraid and unloved.

That makes them feel bad, so they try to find someone to give them what they want--security and love. They turn to parent-substitutes; authority figures. God is a parent substitute. So is the president. This is where the trouble starts, for nobody can go back in time and get the love they never received as a child. They can never go back to childhood and develop the self-esteem and self-confidence that comes from being loved and learning how to love others.

Therefore their search for a parent substitute is doomed to failure, an unacceptable situation that people fight tooth and nail to deny. Admit that your parents didn't or couldn't love you enough to teach you to love yourself and others? Forget that, they'd sooner kill you than admit it. So they try even harder to force their authority to give them what they need. The result is disaster.

There are no gods, no magic, no supernatural world. People would laugh at children for waving a stick and yelling, "Expelliarmus!" and expecting something to happen, yet they don't hesitate to wave a book or scroll and mutter Latin or Hebrew under their breath and expect a deity to listen and obey them. But they need a god, specifically a god who knows them personally (like a parent), loves them unconditionally (like a parent), is omniscient (like a parent in a child's eyes), and will always rescue them (like a parent is supposed to help their child). They will waste a huge chunk of their lives begging this parent substitute for proof of love and attention and never get it, because God is not their father or mother, he is an imaginary creature created out of need.

And people will do the same with the next parent substitute--their political and social leaders. Every president is a potential parent substitute, and we have come to speak of the presidency in parental terms. They must protect us and take care of us and tell us right from wrong. They must punish us when we're bad and reward us when we're good. But they aren't our parents, they are people with the same problems and issues that we have. They, too, are looking for safety and love. They, too, are damaged. But they are very, very rich, and can harm a lot of people while avoiding their own pain, by starting wars to feel safe and protecting their fellow elites to feel loved.

So here we are, debating whom the stimulus will help when we ought to know that the stimulus will help the elites feel safe and protected. We debate who created us, when we already know in our hearts. We fight and lie and deny, deny, deny--anything to avoid the simple truth. It's a tremendously painful truth that offers us nothing but more pain and hard work in the beginning, but it is the truth, and in the end that is the only thing that will set us free to love.

I Thought We Are Adults

Shorter David Brooks: Authoritarianism is good.

Money quote: "Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life."

That's strange. I find my own meaning for my own life, and assume responsibility for correcting my own weaknesses. I don't need another adult or "institution" of adults to do it for me. But I don't think Megan McArdle is a brilliant econoblogger either, as Brooks does, so what do I know?

Jonah Goldberg, Again

I finally read Jonah Goldberg's ode to the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day, thanks to Sadly, No!. This paragraph stands out:

Ultimately, the story is one of redemption, so it should surprise no one that it speaks to those in search of the same. But there is also a secular, even conservative, point to be made here. Connors's metamorphosis contradicts almost everything postmodernity teaches. He doesn't find paradise or liberation by becoming more "authentic," by acting on his whims and urges and listening to his inner voices. That behavior is soul-killing. He does exactly the opposite: He learns to appreciate the crowd, the community, even the bourgeois hicks and their values. He determines to make himself better by reading poetry and the classics and by learning to sculpt ice and make music, and most of all by shedding his ironic detachment from the world.

Poor Jonah. I want to sneer but it's more sad than funny. Putting aside his thinking (wishful) and definition of postmodernity (confused), he is still wrong. To act according to your wants, to listen to your inner self, to be the architect and engineer of your own life, is practically a sin to Jonah and his ilk. They must do--and want--what their parents want. Despite all they say about the voice of God acting as a conscience, they must never listen to their inner voices. To do so would kill their souls, cut them off from God, sentence them to eternal damnation. So Jonah, who loves popular culture and comedy and anarchy, shuts himself into a little box, twisting and compressing himself into a small corner of his own life, in the service of his conservative parents and world.

What does it cost him to become a person who finds joy in using his talents to make un-funny insults at liberals? To see everything from a conservative lens that demands only one possible interpretation of popular culture? To cut himself off from a world of creative people who could never respect what he has let himself become?

It doesn't matter; Goldberg has found his joy in life by being mama's little man, although sadly without the equipment that greased so many wheels for Lucianne.

"We're Special"

It begins with American Exceptionalism and it ends with American Exceptionalism.

Ronald Bailey of Reason Online reads about a repeat of the famous obedience tests ran by Stanley Milgrim. Milgram wanted to know how seemingly ordinary people could willingly harm others if they were instructed to do so by an authority figure. He discovered that most people will simply do what they are told if someone in authority gave them permission to do so or insisted that they do so. Yet Bailey still refuses to believe the evidence, and dredges up pathetic excuses why Americas are not as bad as other people. "As obedience experiments show, Americans are not really any better at resisting the claims of authority than other people," Bailey admits, "yet there was no Gulag and no Auschwitz here." He continues:

True, there was the immense moral evil of slavery, the destruction of Native
Americans, Woodrow Wilson's imprisonment of thousands of dissidents, Franklin
Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans, and more recently, the Abu Ghraib
cruelties. Leaders at all levels can persuade some Americans to participate in
immoral activities.

Ah, it's the Bad Apple theory of badness, a personal favorite of Donald Rumsfeld. The statistics say that about 67% of all Americans will torture others, yet when Americans torture it's just some bad apples. We're not bad, we're just reported that way. Sure, we killed most of the Native Americans and--what's the word?--concentrated the rest in the armpits of the country. Our Scotch Scots-Irish taught Indians to scalp and would bash out the brains of their babies, but we're not Nazis. We're not German. Well, many of us are and our culture is Anglo-Saxon Protestant like the Germans', according to conservatives, and a damn fine one because of it. And yes, we have a bad habit of persecuting those who don't obey authority or who happen to be on the other side of our guns and therefore make us a bit nervous when we see them on our streets. Abu Ghraib is the Big Bad of Bad Apples of course, and it's a good thing those people were all punished. But it doesn't mean that Americans would plan and implement torture procedures, except when they do which is all their fault because they are not Americans and not Freedom-Loving. Bailey continues:

However, the arc of American history has been toward correcting old evils and
the commissioning of fewer atrocities over time. Why? Because our institutions
of freedom have maintained and expanded the norms that limit the powers wielded
by authorities.

For example, a free press is able to criticize practices
like slavery and racial discrimination and help establish new norms. If Bill and
Joanne down the street send their kids Joe and Kathy to an ethnically mixed
school, in other words, it must be OK. In addition, American governmental powers
are fragmented and in competition with one another. As another Milgram
experiment showed, if two experimenters disagreed about continuing the
experiment, the majority of participants sided with the one who argued for
stopping it. In other words, when people could refer to an authority figure who
agreed with their moral views, they were much more likely to act on them.
Similarly, dividing up governmental power increases the chances that some
authorities will act ethically and thus inspire people to act on the dictates of
their consciences.

So if there is a dissenting voice that matches their moral views and if the system of checks and balances is intact and one branch has not grabbed as much power as humanly possible and if an equal authority is present and equally assertive, than most Americans won't torture other Americans. Otherwise they will, and the same people who quite happily permit relocation centers in the country at this very time will torture on command.

Rod Dreher reads Bailey, agrees with his conclusion, and goes further.

In other words, American culture, society and government are structured in ways
that discourage the kind of thing that led to Nazi totalitarianism. The capacity
to be a Nazi resides within each of us, but there are fundamental aspects of our
culture that keep these potentialities in check. The lesson to draw from this, I
think, is that culture and culture-making institutions matter. A lot. This is a
point similar to what Sam Huntington wrote about how these American institutions
evolved out of an Anglo-Protestant culture, and we would be foolish to give up
on that culture, even as Anglo-Protestants are in relative decline.

Gosh, Rod, weren't the Germans Anglo-Protestants too, at least by your standards? In fact, Rod, you would fit in perfectly with Germany's kirk, kinder, kuchen culture.

Over at Nation Review On-line, Jim Manzil agrees with Rod and Bailey. Manzil goes off into a tangent, however, stating that no American would believe that a university would actually torture anyone, so they went ahead and administered the shocks. If Manzil had read the study or Milgrim's fascinating account of his experiment, Obedience to Authority, he would know that is not true, but Manzil would probably find a way to rationalize that as well.

The reason the Germans went along with the Nazis is because they had been raised to obey authority unquestioningly. Americans are often raised the same way, especially conservative Americans. Obedience to God, president and country are integral to their beliefs.

Not everyone will torture. In Milgrim's study he runs across some people who refused to obey and nobody could make them do otherwise. In Bush's America, most conservative Americans jumped at the chance to support their authorities by supporting torture. They rationalized, pondered, thought and prayed, but in the end they always approved. They are, after all, Authoritarians, and would gladly imprison Hispanics and torture and kill Arabs--and they don't even have to push a button.

Merry Christmas!

Megan McArdle is giving me a discussion of authoritarianism for Christmas. I'm so excited! How did she know it was exactly what I wanted?

Right now we have only the teaser; a quote from Julian Sanchez about authoritarianism and the bailouts. I do not know anything about Mr. Sanchez except McArdle's excerpts, but those glimpses aren't exactly impressive. Money quote:

The only question is whether workers in a particular industry are naughty
children who need to be sent to the corner for a time-out, or well-behaved
children who should get a gold sticker for effort. This is, as I hope goes
without saying, a pretty authoritarian frame on either side.

No, Mr. Sanchez. Authoritarianism is not the same thing as what you would probably call the nanny state. The word has an actual definition, and if you and McArdle are going to discuss it, it would be nice if you looked it up. I don't say that to sneer. I very frequently look up common words, because they tend to gain various shades of meaning over the years and it's easy to misunderstand someone's particular interpretation.

When looking at political authoritarianism I use the definition of Bob Altemeyer, University of Manitoba professor.

Authoritarian followers usually support the established authorities in
their society, such as government officials and traditional religious
leaders. Such people have historically been the “proper” authorities in life,
the time-honored, entitled, customary leaders, and that means a lot to most
authoritarians. Psychologically these followers have personalities
featuring:

1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate
authorities in
their society;

2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities;
and

3) a high level of conventionalism.

Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these
followers rightwing authoritarians. I’m using the word “right” in one of its earliest meanings, for in Old English “riht”(pronounced “writ”) as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct, doing what the authorities said. (And when someone did the lawful thing back then, maybe the authorities said,
with a John Wayne drawl, “You got that riht, pilgrim!”) 1 (Click on a note’s number to have it appear.)

In North America people who submit to the established authorities
to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, 2 so
you can call them “right-wingers” both in my new-fangled psychological
sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a
country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist
Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even
though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing
authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political
views. Instead he’s someone who readily submits to the established
authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly
conventional. It’s an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Rightwing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey.

You could have left-wing authoritarian followers as well, who support a
revolutionary leader who wants to overthrow the establishment. I knew a few
in the 1970s, Marxist university students who constantly spouted their chosen
authorities, Lenin or Trotsky or Chairman Mao. Happily they spent most of
their time fighting with each other, as lampooned in Monty Python’s Life of
Brian where the People’s Front of Judea devotes most of its energy to
battling, not the Romans, but the Judean People’s Front. But the left-wing
authoritarians on my campus disappeared long ago. Similarly in America “the
Weathermen” blew away in the wind. I’m sure one can find left-wing
authoritarians here and there, but they hardly exist in sufficient numbers
now to threaten democracy in North America. However I have found bucketfuls of
right-wing authoritarians in nearly every sample I have drawn in Canada and the
United States for the past three decades. So when I speak of “authoritarian followers” in this book I mean right-wing authoritarian followers, as identified by the RWA scale.

That's a lot of definition, but both parties must agree on basics before discussions. I would add one aspect, maybe correction: While certain personalities might be more amenable to authoritarianism, it is something installed during childhood, by one's parents. Parents who demand absolute obedience, forbid questioning and disagreement, and refuse to acknowledge the separate identity of their child are authoritarian, and their children, who want love and acceptance, obey and grow to demand obedience in turn from their own children. Authoritarian children who are eventually thwarted in their need to control others as they were controlled can become very dangerous, as these incredibly strong drives send them outward, to either find someone to obey or force strangers to obey them.

Liberals can be authoritarians also, but tend to only get mild versions of the disease. Rigid people are not drawn to the amorphous, unfettered nature and goals of Democrats. They want rigid rules to follow, so they will know that they are correct in their behavior. They demand that nothing around them changes, for they can't cope with change. It was never allowed, and now it is unfamiliar and frightening. Liberal authoritarians, who also cling to authorities such as a religious, political or cultural group, however, are still authoritarians. They wouldn't side with the workers because the workers are not the leaders; management and the owners are. The "naughty children" aren't in charge, and insisting that they need help isn't authoritarianism.

Megan promises more, and I wait with bated breath.

Obama and Authority

Kathy G. has an interesting post up about Vincent Bugliosi's book "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder." Her post inspired me to look up what Obama said about the prosecution of members of the Bush Administration. I found an Attytood post that said the opposite of what I remembered: Obama would prosecute the criminals in the White House.

The bottom line is that: Obama sent a clear signal that -- unlike impeachment, which he's ruled out and which now seems a practical impossibility -- he is at the least open to the possibility of investigating potential high crimes in the Bush White House. To many, the information that waterboarding -- which the United States has considered torture and a violation of law in the past -- was openly planned out in the seat of American government is evidence enough to at least start asking some tough questions in January 2009.

But that's not what Obama said. Once again, some liberals are listening to Obama and hearing only what they want to hear. It's what we correctly accuse the other side of doing, but it was jarring to see this happen regarding Obama.

Obama states he wouldn't want to be seen as indulging in "partisan witch-hunts." If crimes have been comitted, though, he'll have the AG look into it. If? If? We clearly know they have broken the law, over and over. It's not a suspicion, it's a fact. But Obama needs to see if it's just bad policies, not law-breaking. He'll have someone look into it.

You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I've said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances.

Shredding the Constitution is not an exceptional circumstance?

Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law -- and I think that's roughly how I would look at it.

That statement, along with Obama's deep belief in both religious and political authority, make it clear that Obama will not be inclined to do anything to prosecute the Bush Administration. That's dreadful, but not as bad as us deliberately refusing to deal with unhappy reality. We cannot pressure Obama to restore the rule of law if he won't admit it's been broken, but worse, we leave ourselves utterly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of circumstance if we refuse to admit Obama is like any other politician of any other time. If we insist that he is better than he is out of a need to feel better about who we are, we will be just as blind as----K-Lo.

(**Shudder**)

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.

Arthur Silber is back, thank heavens, telling the truth to people who don't want to hear it. As is Chris Floyd.

There is always hope of America becoming better, there is always hope for
positive change. But that hope does not reside -- and has never resided -- in a
single politician, or party, or faction. It resides in every individual citizen:
in what they think and believe, in what they will accept and countenance, in
what they will not stand for, in what they will work for. Hope resides in the
amount of knowledge and truth and insight that we can all produce and
disseminate and act upon. And hope depends on our ability -- and our willingness
-- to confront reality as it is, to deal with our leaders and would-be leaders
as they are, not as we wish them to be. For how can you change anything if you
cannot see it clearly?

Why can't we see this clearly? Because we lie to ourselves. We say that we need someone to save us, we need a hero, a strong leader to tell us what to do, how to think. Why on earth would we want someone to make decisions for us? Because we don't know what to do. We don't know who to trust, to believe. We don't know what we want or how to get it. We don't know how we feel, or why we feel the things that do affect us, such as fear and anger. How can we be such strangers to ourselves?

We lie. We say our nation is the greatest in the world, the most kind and helpful. We say we are helpless without an authority to tell us what to do. We say our parents were all good and kind and selfless, our children better than average, our way of life the only way to live. Our god is real, and the one true god, while all the others are false. We lie. Over and over and over. And then we lie some more. We go to our graves buried in our lies.

Obviously, we do this so we can survive, feel good enough about ourselves to get out of bed in the morning, face the world of pain and grief and uncertainty. But everyone doesn't do this. Silber and Floyd don't. They accept the pain, accept the uncertainty, accept the truth. And because of this, they can look at the world with honest, seeing eyes, while the rest of the nation sees through a glass darkly.

The Authoritarian leadership is out of control.

Do conservatives hate their fellow Americans and America in general? They are constantly complaining about them. Women are spoiled, blacks are resentful, Hispanics are leeches on the system, teenagers are disrespectful and violent, everyone persecutes Christians. And when conservatives see a problem they have one solution: more control.

They need someone-something-anything else to come along and make them feel secure. Security, to them, is gained through control. More laws, more priests, more guns, more guards controlling more Americans. One might begin to think that the goal is controlling others out of mindless fear, not protecting the US, which incidentally happens to be the richest* and most powerful nation on earth, in this or any other time. If women aren't controlled men will no longer be needed. If blacks aren't controlled they'll rape your women and riot in your cities. If Hispanics aren't controlled they'll take the Southwest back. If Arabs aren't controlled they'll invade your country, kill your leaders, and convert you to Islam.

Why are conservatives filled with so much mindless fear? Why do they turn to control to deal with problems? Because it is what they know. It's what they were taught from birth. Authoritarian parents demand obedience in return for love. They might do this unconsciously and in response to how they were raised, but they do it all the same. The core of authoritarianism, the rag-and-bone shop of its heart, is the need each one of us has to be loved for ourselves. Just as we are, not prettier, smarter, more religious or more obedient. Loved for our faults as well as our good points, loved the way open and giving babies and little children love, with all their hearts and minds and souls. We give it to our parents and they are either able to love this way in return, or they are not. Authoritarian parents are not able to love their children unequivocally.

They demand obedience instead of seeing the child as an equal. The child's preference are unimportant, it is what the parent wants that counts. The child can't have different opinions, especially in areas of authority such as family, religion and government. And the child grows angry and frustrated, but doesn't dare let himself feel these emotions. If he does, his parents will be angry with him and that means they don't love him. So the child denies his feelings, and soon all feelings. And he grows up, and has children of his own.

We can no longer afford to indulge the authoritarian mindset. Popes and pundits, Bushes and McCains, Democrats who vow to bomb Iran. They are dangerous, and time is running out. There is also the strange catagory of people who choose authoritarianism, some liberals who still have authoritarian tendencies in religion, for example, or fearful people who did not grow up in an authoritarian family but crave control all the same. But most authoritarians, I think, are conservative, and it's long past time everyone starting pointing out this fundamental flaw.


*Once. Now, not so much.