Cheryl Mendelson, HuffPo: Why, in Politics, Crazy Goes With Mean

[highplainsdem]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cheryl-mendelson/why-in-politics-crazy-goe_b_1829998.html

We can only succeed in being rational if conscience is strong enough. If it isn't, logic gets overruled by id and interest. As a result we rationalize, exaggerate, deny and contradict ourselves. When our moral center does not hold, we are prone to blind ourselves to uncomfortable facts and inconsistencies, to fall back on superstition, to believe what serves our own interests or our rageful desire for vengeance, or to think as everyone else thinks or some authority dictates. Ego dominates our sense of reality, and wishes, fears, sadism, and rage are in control. Crazy and mean go together.

This tie between irrationality and moral wrong has become the central fact of contemporary American politics. Yet for 40 years the political faction in which this tie is most obvious has touted itself as the party of "morality." We have a burgeoning radical right that is both the unreasonable party and, despite its moral pretensions, the party of cruelty, greed and dishonesty. This isn't to say that conservatism is immoral and liberalism isn't. Both conservatism and liberalism are built on moral insights of one kind or another, and no one rational can fail to see that moral flaws like greed and dishonesty exist all along the political spectrum. The problem is that on the right, irrationality and opposition to moral values are not merely personal flaws. They are policy.

The ways in which this is true are discouragingly familiar and numerous. On the one hand, rightist politicians question the science of evolution and climate change, endorse wacky economics, and insist that Obama is a muslim who was born in Africa. On the other, they promote rage politics, tell fibs and destroy jobs and wages and families in order to enrich a tiny group of bankers and businessmen. To evade the central moral ideals of kindness, mercy, and forgiveness, the right dismisses those who defend them as weak, effeminate, whining, bleeding hearts. Then it enacts laws that make the United States the prison and death penalty capital of the world. In fact, the right promotes vengeance and heartlessness throughout the law and, against all reason and in defiance of obvious fact, denies both that waterboarding and other horrors are torture and that law and morality forbid us to torture prisoners. These policies reflect failures of conscience -- a lack of empathy or a habit of overruling empathy when it is inconvenient or conflicts with self-interest or self-approval, and a surrender to sadism and vengefulness.

To preserve its image as the party of virtue, the right defends a smug pseudomorality, detached from any real sense of guilt or obligation or compassion and aiming first at control and punishment of others rather than, as with true conscience, self-judgment and self-control. So rightists inveigh against homosexuality and gay marriage, deny any moral difference between live human tissue and real human lives, and sentimentalize that doing so protects families. This false moral fervor lets them deceive themselves and others about their own greed and crookedness. The worse they are in reality, the more rabidly they defends these fake, self-serving "convictions." In the end, they conclude that they are so good, and their enemies so evil, that they must be in power at all costs, even if this means undermining rational government and fair elections. And rather than lose a campaign debate about reality with some pointy-headed, high-IQ economist or geologist or climatologist, they choose instead simply to abandon truth and reality altogether. Instead, they opt to undermine the voters' understanding -- manipulating their rage, inflating their prejudices, and feeding them misinformation.

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