Now, ex-wives might elicit some hysteria. I’d say that’s about 50/50.

I recall one incident some years ago that was discussed here. A female conservative was attending some function where a noted liberal was speaking.

She interrupted to make some remark disagreeing with what he was saying. There was no attempt to ignore her or have her removed. The speaker just became enraged and started calling her a c**t who should get cancer and die.

I may be misquoting the exact insults but not the intensity and profanity of the attack.

Nobody here went hysterical, in that particular thread but we have seen it here.

I have to confess to emulating this liberal tendency to go postal, in the past. I can only blame it on old anger issues that have faded somewhat with age.

“I wouldn’t have thought it controversial to observe that our governance and politics are unusually, almost singularly, dysfunctional these days. Which logically means that we were doing it better in the past. Something that both memory and written history confirm–throughout much of American history, and especially in most of the postwar period up until recently, the government managed to function and ‘compromise’ was not equated with surrender to Satan.”

You then followed this with a fifty-year-old political attack on conservatism as some kind of psychological aberration.

Anyone in our age group knows damn well that knock-down, drag-out, take-no-prisoners politics is not a “recent” phenomenon. Hell, look at the 1964 campaign.

I’m not stooping to trying to “win” on a technicality, though. But it’s not clear why you’d be trying to deflect discussion with a red herring about the statement having been written a half century ago. Thus my “huh?”. Why does it matter? If anything, its observations should be even more compelling if I recognize, across time, today’s rightwing extremists in Hofstadter’s description from 50 years ago. That’s genuine timeless truth right there.

I can tell you from what I’ve read so far that Hofstadter’s thesis focuses on extremists (of a multitude of political persuasions), the rightwing flavor he pointedly labels “pseudo-conservatives” to distinguish them from the “reputable” variety.

Which is why I have to admit that it’s gratifyingly amusing that you’re exhibiting that very narcissistic paranoia he ascribes to the extremists, when you assume that Hofstadter is talking about You. I blame Ayn Rand for that character flaw.

Or are you humbly copping to being an extremist?

Once they realized they weren’t going to get their way with Civil Rights, they realized they were going to have to live in a free country where their race, class, culture, religion and property no longer gave them guaranteed supremacy.

Dylan wrote a song about it, right about that time. You were probably too young to have really picked up on it. Too bad. The arts are usually way ahead of the politicians.

Folk Rock.

[youtube id="GyX-hRNUAss" /]

The Hofstadter article was written in 1964, specifically as an attack on Goldwater.

“But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.” – Hofstadter

That statement is half a century old. Sound familiar?

To return to Rob’s analogy with computer operating systems, I think there’s value in studying how each OS works with the goal of restoring interoperability. This article at Salon, The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic, seems like a fair assessment of the state of the rightwing mind these days. And it reminded me of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, of which I’d heard but not yet gotten around to reading. Which oversight has now been corrected and I’m reading it now. More on that as it ferments.

It seems to infuriate rightwingers when I attempt to understand them. Not sure why that is, exactly, except for the recursive observation that maybe it’s part of that “paranoid style”. But Rob’s on the right track to observe that we have different mental architectures, left and right, and so I’m not deterred by rightwing outrage at the inquiry. Not that I’ve ever been deterred before, of course.

Even modern man, who presumably has a better understanding of the social and psychological causes of violence is ready to accept at the drop of a hat that all his countrymen are right, and all his enemies are wrong, and it is perfectly all right to slaughter perfect strangers on a mass scale.

This is a tribal thing. We don’t fight people who are wired differently, we wire ourselves to be like the side we’re going to fight on. Why did Russians, English, French and Germans slaughter each other by the millions over some Austro-Hungarian princeling? And why did we get involved?

I just think we’re going to have to accept the fact that we exhibit, and accept, collective behavior we would never engage in individualy. We are, after all, social animals, even more than we think so.