The American Conservative Movement is powered by an overwhelming hatred of perceived “weakness,” which originated from a variety of misappropriated political, philosophical & literary sources in response to Emancipation, and was wielded primarily as a racial bludgeon, but evolved into a thuggish bootstrap individualist counterweight to the perceived threat of soviet collectivism, which served, in turn, to popularize the movement by providing a galvanizing external enemy and a ready-made straw man at which to tilt during any political argument, as popularized by ‘Tailgunner’ Joe.
Empathy is only a one-way value on the far-right. A Calvinist sense of “the Elect” suffuses this movement— real, righteous White Christian Americans, who deserve prosperity by birthright, are besieged by mongrel hordes who seek wealth in exchange for weakness, latecomers & sponges whose gains are ill-gotten, even if attained by similar means as the Elect. A tea party diehard does not refuse government handouts because they believe they DESERVE recompense for being who they are. They just don’t want ‘undersirables’ getting what is rightfully theirs.
Some of it arose from Civil War defeat bitterness, a way of life rejected as sinful & outrageous by the world at large, but mostly it is a perversion of Smithian free market propaganda, Emersonian individualism, and a Crusader-level Christian chauvinism, all manipulated by a wealthy Capitalist class that realized misguided populism against legitimate wealth-redistributing reform movements benefited them:s a motivated underclass would fight against their own economic interests at the behest of the very plutocrats oppressing them! We are seeing this laid bare with the ascendance of Fox News, an overt cultivator of unrealistic American dreams of wealth & instant success and shrieking xenophobic naysayer shifting accountability for domestic problems to anybody but its target demographic & their nefarious patrons.
In short: Glenn Beck is a fucktard. God save the Teabaggers from themselves.
I apologize for the disorderly nature of this unedited facebook response. The truth is in there, somewhere. Thx @JayFeezy for the inspiration.
