They are taking us backwards in time, to tribalism, and our salvation may be that theirs is a very small tribe. Even so, they can do enormous damage. It has happened before.
The break up of Yugoslavia showed it is possible for divisive
politicians to destroy a country. All they and their media allies
needed to do was gradually convince people that their differences
between one another were more important than their similarities. The
rest followed.
Tribalism has been the chief barrier to establishing viable democracies in many parts of the world. Most African countries' boundaries were drawn ignoring who lived there. As a result peoples who lived peaceably with one another were divided, and lumped with peoples with very different cultural and political identities. Chaos and dictatorship resulted. When boundaries respected tribal divisions, democracy succeeds. Botswana is a good example.
We see the same problem in Iraq today where Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds form three groups with little sense of mutual identity. What sense they once had as Iraqis has been eroded by ambitious politicians. Violence is down in Baghdad at least as much due to ethnic cleansing having separated whole peoples as to Bush's 'surge.'
The same took place in Yugoslavia, another country where divisions were deliberately exacerbated by ambitious politicians, with incredibly lethal results. There was little likelihood of this carnage until politicians with the aid of their media allies began convincing Yugoslavs that many of their fellow citizens were no good.
Their American equivalents are the media stars and leading politicians among the "Christian" right and the culture warriors in geenral.
For a tribal mentality, loyalty to one's tribe, not one's country is what counts. This can establish a viable country when it is homogenous, but the stage is set for trouble when it is not. When one group wins they seek to install permanent rule: one man, one vote, one time. Then the other group feels tyrannized over, and rebels.
Republicans and American conservatives are increasingly acting like tribes hostile to the rest of us, not citizens. Never in the lifetime of anyone now living have the losers of an American election done so much to discredit the electoral process, deliberately prevent government from working, and encourage a wide ranging sense of crisis and danger among their followers as have the modern Republican Party and its allies. Never.
Utter nutjobs like Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others have done their level best to instill panic fear and rage among those stupid enough to believe them. And yes, 'stupid' is the right word. Bachmann calls for revolution. Beck says we are headed to either communism or fascism , depending on the day he speaks. Then, when the weakest minds among their audience lash out lethally, they claim innocence.
Compare what they say, and say daily, in the name of a false 'patriotism' with how they reacted when the Dixie Chicks said they were "asahmed" George Bush was from their home state of Texas. They were pulled from the air because of right wing outrage.
We now know right wing terrorist and murderer Richard Poplawski liked Glenn Beck enough that he posted "a link to [neoNazi] Stormfront of a YouTube video featuring talk show host Glenn Beck talking about FEMA camps with Congressman Ron Paul." Encouraging violence, Beck gets prime time week after week.
The Republican Party would rather the people of Minnesota go without a fairly elected Senator than allow Al Franken to take the office he fairly won even though there is now no way his Republican opponent can possibly win through counting votes. If EVERY still contested vote went to Coleman, he would still lose.
Sarah Palin wants a new Senatorial election in Alaska because Sen. Stevens was tried by Republicans, and later had the case thrown out due to serious prosecutorial misconduct. Elections count only when their side wins, as we learned in 2000 when imported mobs of Republican goons prevented vote counting in Florida. They haven't changed.
A country lasts about as long as people can agree to be good winners and good losers. It dissolves when that mutual trust breaks dwn. Worse than any communist during the Cold War, these people and their allies are undermining America.
What country were these people in during their last lifetime? Rawanda?
Tribalism has been the chief barrier to establishing viable democracies in many parts of the world. Most African countries' boundaries were drawn ignoring who lived there. As a result peoples who lived peaceably with one another were divided, and lumped with peoples with very different cultural and political identities. Chaos and dictatorship resulted. When boundaries respected tribal divisions, democracy succeeds. Botswana is a good example.
We see the same problem in Iraq today where Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds form three groups with little sense of mutual identity. What sense they once had as Iraqis has been eroded by ambitious politicians. Violence is down in Baghdad at least as much due to ethnic cleansing having separated whole peoples as to Bush's 'surge.'
The same took place in Yugoslavia, another country where divisions were deliberately exacerbated by ambitious politicians, with incredibly lethal results. There was little likelihood of this carnage until politicians with the aid of their media allies began convincing Yugoslavs that many of their fellow citizens were no good.
Their American equivalents are the media stars and leading politicians among the "Christian" right and the culture warriors in geenral.
For a tribal mentality, loyalty to one's tribe, not one's country is what counts. This can establish a viable country when it is homogenous, but the stage is set for trouble when it is not. When one group wins they seek to install permanent rule: one man, one vote, one time. Then the other group feels tyrannized over, and rebels.
Republicans and American conservatives are increasingly acting like tribes hostile to the rest of us, not citizens. Never in the lifetime of anyone now living have the losers of an American election done so much to discredit the electoral process, deliberately prevent government from working, and encourage a wide ranging sense of crisis and danger among their followers as have the modern Republican Party and its allies. Never.
Utter nutjobs like Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and others have done their level best to instill panic fear and rage among those stupid enough to believe them. And yes, 'stupid' is the right word. Bachmann calls for revolution. Beck says we are headed to either communism or fascism , depending on the day he speaks. Then, when the weakest minds among their audience lash out lethally, they claim innocence.
Compare what they say, and say daily, in the name of a false 'patriotism' with how they reacted when the Dixie Chicks said they were "asahmed" George Bush was from their home state of Texas. They were pulled from the air because of right wing outrage.
We now know right wing terrorist and murderer Richard Poplawski liked Glenn Beck enough that he posted "a link to [neoNazi] Stormfront of a YouTube video featuring talk show host Glenn Beck talking about FEMA camps with Congressman Ron Paul." Encouraging violence, Beck gets prime time week after week.
The Republican Party would rather the people of Minnesota go without a fairly elected Senator than allow Al Franken to take the office he fairly won even though there is now no way his Republican opponent can possibly win through counting votes. If EVERY still contested vote went to Coleman, he would still lose.
Sarah Palin wants a new Senatorial election in Alaska because Sen. Stevens was tried by Republicans, and later had the case thrown out due to serious prosecutorial misconduct. Elections count only when their side wins, as we learned in 2000 when imported mobs of Republican goons prevented vote counting in Florida. They haven't changed.
A country lasts about as long as people can agree to be good winners and good losers. It dissolves when that mutual trust breaks dwn. Worse than any communist during the Cold War, these people and their allies are undermining America.
What country were these people in during their last lifetime? Rawanda?
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe
Once the Republicans included people such as Mike describes as a significant part of its members. No more. They may still vote Republican out of habit, but that reflects more on their willful blindness than on the Party they support.
You say Beck is a Libertarian – I’m afraid you are not even close. Do you remember his words when his party was in power? Now that Republicans are out of power they fall back on their talk of limited government, etc. but when they were in power they rode roughshod over the constitution, the law, and the rights of people who disagreed with them to an extent unprecedented in a peacetime government. Because war was never declared they could blur the difference between war and peace, exercising wartime powers all the time, and attacking critics as unpatriotic.
It is now a highly monolithic force by American standards as witnessed by its enormous discipline in Congressional votes both in and out of power, something unprecedented in recent times. It has divisions that matter, this includes the “christian” right, the right wing side of corporate interests, and neoconservatives in the driver’s seat. They agree on big government, militarism, and using moral issues as a means to win and gain political power. Their differences are real, but usually easily compromised away, enabling them to make genuine small government Republicans about as relevant as flat earthers. This centralized discipline overcomes the logic of Federalist 10 on how to prevent tyranny of the majority. I invite you to go read it.
The Republican Party is a subversive and destructive force in our country, controlled by the power crazed and/or bigoted, who have a lock on primaries, with Republicans such as you describe too timid, weak, or blind, to challenge their current base. Consider this- in 2006 60 percent of white evangelical Christians believed the Bible should trump democracy. This is the controlling part of the Republican ‘base.’ I’ll listen to arguments such as yours with less disbelief when you show me a case of small government Republicans defeating these folks in a primary.
I look forward to that day. More likely, the Republicans will be replaced by a political opposition in greater harmony with our constitution. Either would be good.
A single party is not good for us, although I anticipate an interesting set of Democratic primaries in years to come, as that is where good citizens will now go to effect the future of their country.
And no, the Democrats have never been like that. Troy, misses my point.
I have as little use for big government conservatives as I have for big government liberals. You won't find a lot of praise of Bush and his policies on my blog. The true small government conservatives are, unfortunately, a very small group. But do small government liberals exist at all? I am of the opinion that most of the criticisms of Bush were entirely partisan, as if he had in fact had a D after his name, nobody would have guessed he was a Republican. HIs rhetoric on a few social issues was "conservative," but his actions made no difference on those social issues -- any more than Clinton's actions did in the other direction ("Don't Ask, Don't Tell" resulted in even more gays being thrown out).
I guess that's why until the very end he was called a conservative, by conservatives, eh?
Small government conservatives are actually a contradiction in terms, once they have power. The states rights crowd only wanted a small national government so they could do whatever they wanted at the state level they controlled.
Once they controlled the national government all talk of local government independence disappeared. Terri Schiavo, anyone?
Small government LIBERALS made a deal with the devil when they allied with conservatives after World War Two, and most have still to comprehend the depth of their mistake.
Maybe someday.
Actually, I heard a lot of criticism from conservatives that Bush wasn't a conservative. However, Nixon, Reagan, and Ron Paul are all called "conservatives." How similar are those three, actually? Would Nixon, with his economic policies, be a Republican now? Doubtful. Unfortunately, you can't help what people want to call themselves. I would love it if conspiracy theorists wouldn't call themselves libertarians, but they do. I would love it if the Left hadn't taken the term "liberal," but they did. You know as well as I do that such liberals have become almost meaningless in the U.S.
In the U.S. liberals are really center-leftists (and increasingly postmodernists), yet "neo-liberals" are supporters of free markets and are practically interchangeable with "libertarians." The libertarians consider themselves to be the true American conservatives, but at the same time you have your Religious Right, which is in fact primarily made up of social conservatives and former Southern Democrats who could really care less about free market economics, and if pressed are actually welfare statists and interventionists. Then you have your neocons, whose ideas can be traced back to Leo Strauss, who studied under Heidegger, but whose founding ranks were mostly ex-Marxists (politically, if you combine fascism and Marxism, you get postmodernism -- the neocons are thus really the postmodern right). Most in the GOP aren't ideological at all, but are only sort of vague Keyneseans. I suspect that Bush II falls mostly in the last category, though on foreign affairs, he was greatly influenced by neocons.
In short, the terms are all over the place, and inconsistent. I would love it if we could actually clarify terms in American politics. It would clear things up quite a bit.
The break up of Yugoslavia showed not that it is possible for divisive politicians to destroy a country, but rather that it was a communist dictatorship that held the country together in the first place.
Similarly, the "problem" in Iraq is not simply that Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds are three groups with little sense of mutual identity, but rather that they never had a significant mutual identity, and were the victims of having a Western-style nation-state forced upon them where none existed before, held together by--here we go again--a dictatorship.
Not everyone in the world believes in the desirability, or even cultural portability, of the Western-style state. In fact, the West didn't even believe in that before the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
Tribalism is almost certainly the wave of the future, partly as the West and its ideals decline in influence, partly as the internet facilitates communication among the like-minded (i.e., the West's answer to the idea of 'tribe').
Post a Comment
By submitting these comments, I agree to the beliefnet.com terms of service, rules of conduct and privacy policy (the "agreements"). I understand and agree that any content I post is licensed to beliefnet.com and may be used by beliefnet.com in accordance with the agreements.