My blog is not about politics. (Well, not much anyway.) It’s for “miscellaneous musings about the human condition.” Politics is just the occasional springboard to those musings.
Yesterday I described my breakfast conversation with someone who was woefully uninformed about his chosen topic but had firm opinions nonetheless. The subject was health care reform, but it might as well have been government bailouts, liberal elites, global warming, or whatever. No matter the issue, mad-as-hell voters like this gentleman rant on about imagined foes, are moved by chauvinistic patriotism, seek reinforcement for their preconceived ideas, and vote for whoever panders to their emotions. It does little good to cite facts; they aren’t interested. And are their minds are already made up? You betcha!
While musing about the breakfast bloviator, I asked rhetorically: why does anger trump logic, and whatever happened to critical thinking skills? The answers have to do with fear, of course. When people are afraid, they get frustrated and angry, and rationality disappears. They latch onto what a friend calls "value-menu ideology"—Tea Party rhetoric and concepts that, like fast food, are simple, readily available, and addictive. Thus, happy meal ideas clog the arteries of our public discourse.
My usual response to these troglodytes is to ignore them or mock them (as I just did in my choice of words). But perhaps I need to probe deeper and ask other questions. If fear causes anger, which in turn displaces logic, where does the fear itself come from? Is it simply an uninformed, irrational reflex? Is it nostalgia for the “good old days”? Should we demonize these agitated people, laugh at their ignorance, and deride the fractional truths they hear on cable news and talk radio? Or ought we to recognize their fear as a natural reaction to a perceived threat? If so, what is that threat?
The threat, I submit, is to America’s mythological narrative: the story that we all share to one degree or another; the story about Rugged Individualists, the American Dream, and the Land of Opportunity. This story/myth/narrative is neither true nor false; it just is. It’s part of our national psyche, and many conservatives so strongly relate to it that it seems part of their own identity. So when major social changes occur (the economy goes south, a person of color is elected President, health reform passes), they subconsciously feel the narrative is being changed and their identity is being threatened. The natural “mama bear” instinct takes over and they want to fight: “Give me my country back!”
To make matters worse, popular media inflame these subliminal fears. To quote one of my trusted correspondents: “Tea Partiers have been boxed into a natural but extreme psychological state—the state of a cornered animal—by [certain] media. It is a story of psychological extortion. The people who control the information make you distrust their competitors, convince you that your identity is at stake, and offer you the only solution.”
That solution, of course, is to continue watching their particular cable channel. My friend then concludes:
The problem lies at the top of the ideological supply chain, not at the bottom. Just as uneducated, impoverished people should not bear the entire blame for buying their children a steady diet of double cheeseburgers, neither should Tea Partiers be blamed for choking down the fear sandwiches that the media feed them. Their intellectual obesity is no different from the physical obesity that afflicts their analogous brethren. Because of their value-menu ideology they cannot participate in rational dialogue any more than fast-food addicts can run a marathon. The blame lies in the corporate exploitation of those who do not have the privilege of making themselves a salad.
So … I try to remind myself that it is really all Glen Beck’s fault. (LOL)
As hopeless as our challenge seems, we who want to be rational and dispassionate need calmly to engage people like the breakfast bloviator. We need to recognize their genuine fears and find at least a few points of common ground. We also need to remind them that they shouldn’t believe everything they hear on cable news and talk radio. They should be skeptical of easy answers, question everything, demand proof, and spread truth not rumor.
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