YearlyKos conference rattles conservative establishment

Coulter spoke at CPAC. These people are desperate. They still think most of the people in America think like they do and that’s because they think they are the only people in America with legitimacy. They have spouted hate on all the air ways and still get invited to the WH. Every week their opinions blurt out over the TV yet they have been consistently wrong on everything.

Kristol and the others mentioned are an insult to rationality. They are becoming angrier because they are increasingly irrelevant and unimportant. They hate that so few are even paying any attention to them and that few are the same WH supporter few. The majority of us know what these people are and merely endure them.

I know I’m probably beating a dead horse on this one, but I often hear progressives/liberals refered to as NAZIs or KKKers. I’ve been out of college almost 20 years (yes, I am, as my teenage kids say, old) that the Fascist movement, as well as the KKK and other white supremacist groups, arose out a profoundly conservative and nationalistic milieu. The idea of fascism was a state corporatism revolving around a strong link between major industry and the government, with a healthy dose of fear of the outsider used to mobilize the populace. The southern white groups came from fear of change, fear of economic dislocation, and racism, with a healthy dose of economic protectionism from the rich sponsers in order to maintain a cheap labor force. In both situations, the creators and supporters of these groups were the landed gentry and the industrialists who saw fascism (in all its many guises including the Klan) as a way to maintain economic power.

Gee. Which political group does this sound like? The Democratic Party? or the Rupublican Party?

For the write wing nutosphere to refer to liberals/progressives as NAZIs and KKKers shows incredible historical ignorance.

One of my college professors once said: “Conservativism taken to its illogical extreme is fascism. Liberalism taken to its illogical extreme is communism. Democracy means sitting on the fence and taking the best from conservatism and liberalism, which America has managed to do for 200 years.” If he were still alive, would his definition of democracy still hold?

Signed:

A Liberal Veteran

By demonizing lefty political sites, they advertise them.

It’s too late for them to try ignoring the liberal blogosphere; with major candidates coming to blog events, liberal blogs have broken through and are becoming more and more known. Shifting over to attacking them is all they can do, because, as Dukakis found out, you can’t ignore your enemies.

I love this line at the TP link CB cites, and think it cuts right to the heart of the matter: “The attendees of the YearlyKos convention haven’t “gone left.” Kristol just doesn’t understand how radically right wing he is.”

Many moderates and independents were once taken in by the conservative movement, but the more they learned about the far right that controlled it, the more they reject it. Kristol and others, trapped in a bubble of like-minded radicals, haven’t realized it yet. The more they scream and vilify those outside their bubble, the more they’re likely to alienate additional voters. At least, I hope that’s how this plays out.

Good commentary above on the whole issue.

So of course I feel the need to reiterate in my own words:

The more desperate they are, the more fear & hate they try to generate.

Conservative reactors (reactors as opposed to thinkers) tend to be Me- firsters and are the usual angels of tyranny/hate/fear and death. They tend toward patriarchal or other authoritarianistic models (like nazism) probably because most of them lack that inner light engendered by love in the early years and think that authority is the only way to bring order. Of course some are just sociopathically greedy. Many think their own sexuality is bad…much less that of others. Corrupt corporate political cronies are always Me firsters.

Progressive or liberal thinkers tend to like and accept humans and human nature. (ie sex) They are most often the harbingers of civil liberties and democracies…bringers of life & health & jobs ..They tend to be We firsters,

Something I found of sociological interest although it was a small sampling: In the runup to the 2004 elections I found myself living in a rural area where book clubs were one of the few mentally stimulating outlets available in a social setting. It was noted that not one member of the book club was a Republican…and one of the members who attended yet another book club in the next burg…said the same of that group.

Maybe Conservatives don’t really think…but only use confirmational bias?

Richard Hofstadter had it right in “The Paranoid Tradition in American Politics,” writing on the pseudo-conservative (i.e. what is today’s “movement conservative”):

It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative — I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates — because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ
the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions.

Their political reactions express rather a profound and largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence … The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere…… The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.

All hail, Dark Lord Kos!

I think we are not going to psych these people out by trying to make them think that using their mass-media mouthpiece to villainize liberals is not going to work or is going to blow up in their faces. It’s too common-sense and too easy to understand that using influence on people who are subject to influence is what’s going to tend to make them think like you want them to. If you don’t think these Republicans know things, this is one of the lessons they especially know, because they’ve been practicing this stuff on people and thinking about it all day for years. It is you guys who have been neglecting it and not thinking about it enough and don’t really get it, or don’t really care, often, it unfortunately seems, because too many ofyou think there is something fundamentally wrong with all the people who are not decidedly on your side already such that none of them could ever be able to appreciate any of your point of view.

Notice the “ignore and laugh it off” strategy is what ends up not working for the racists in the Ghandi quote someone else put up on this blog earlier today. There’s no reason we need to start adopting that strategy unless their TV show ratings are poor and going down.

As usual, I think we have to notice this stuff and point out how crazy it is in as much rational detail as possible (but not in a tiresome way or at length, of course) and try to make sure people realize how crazy it is when these people call liberals Stalinists and stuff like that. The proper reaction to that really is to first point out that it’s crazy, and then explain exactly why it’s crazy. And if you don’t think you’re being remiss in explaining these people sometimes is going to lead to some people thinking that maybe these conservatives aren’t too bad because they’re not not hearing an objection this time, then you’re not understanding people. What people want to believe at a given time has a lot to do with what they’re going to believe (i.e., people want to believe something that other people seem to believe, and so forth), and how people form their beliefs or opinions is a pretty simple recipe that can be exploited.

Republicans direct their people by talking all this shit all the time about how you’re Mao Tse-Tung, and how we’re all hypocrites, and how you want to turn the US into some kind of weird society and let crime run rampant. If you want to psych out Republicans, what psychs them out is just explaining what your points of view are and why, and explaining the reasons and the facts behind what you believe. Also, focus on being practical and realistic: if you have liberal friends who have and cockamamie ideas, challenge them, don’t just let it go unquestioned to preserve your social relationships. You’re attitude to anything a liberal says shouldn’t just be, implicitly, “Oh, all ideas have their merit, and you’re a unique person deserving of respect and dignity, so appropriate responses to anything you say- as long as it’s not a conservative idea- can be an approving smile, nod and an ‘Uh-huh.'” Let’s hone our ideas and really show people we actually have good ideas.

It’s a lot easier to oppose people you don’t understand, especially when it’s their enemies who are giving you the scoop about them.

Simply put, the right wing fears folks of any other political perspective getting organized and getting active. Kudos to Kos for keeping the momentum rolling.

To hear right and far, far right wing viewpoints one only has to tune into Fox news, for everyone else, we have to wait for YearlyKos. I can’t make that event, but a YearlyCarpetbagger would be meeting I’d gladly travel to. I’d be thrilled to attend an event with spirited debate from smart people who could open up my world to new, well-conceived viewpoints. That type of convocation is Bill Kristol’s biggest nightmare.

“That’s the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. — Substandard’s Kristal Nut

Times change; three or four years ago, Kristol was a respectable talking head, at least in some circles…

How close the relationship between the Daily Kos and the Yearly Kos is, is immaterial. The journlists and the talking heads have dropped the ball, so more and more people are moving to blogs (and internet in general) for news and opinions. Those news may not always be chosen, and opinions may not always be presented, in a perfectly objective manner but… They’re presented with links to *sources*, which can be easily checked for veracity, unlike the blather that Kristol (and others like him) spouts on TV and radio.

At least… That’s true of the “lefty” blogs that I read. Judging by occasional “reports” from CB of what happens on the right side of the fence, I don’t think I’d get much enlightment there.

Ask me, I think it’s all keyboard envy on Kristol’s part

I disagree with Talking Stick’s implicit characterization of my argument, which was typical of one of the wildly distorting comments that frequently follow my comments. I wasn’t trying to say that people who read blogs can’t have power or be an important contingent, nor was I assuming that Bill O’Reilly or anyone else in the MSM don’t read blogs. On the contrary, I think that it is certainly possible that most people who are both interested in politics and who have a voice in the MSM (for example politicians who can get TV interviews or news coverage of their statements, and pundits or hosts like O’Reilly) probably have people in their social circles or assistants/production staff who mention to them what the buzz is on the blogs.

However, I was referring to the specific class of people who work as propagandists for the far-right wing and whose shows or books are filled with distortion or hate-speech. They are professional fear-mongerers, and they follow their M.O. so consistently because they know it works. My argument was just that we haven’t nearly entered conditions yet where suggesting to these people that speaking like that was going to turn counterproductive (reasons it might turn counterproductive are because people had become too keyed in to the facts or too adverse to the far right-wing message), because propagandists are too sensitive and keyed in to what they’re doing, would be more than a futile game. There is a better way to spend the time you spend pushing keys on a keyboard.