Rethinking the Right-Wing Mentality
This past election has caused me to re-think some things. I used to believe there were two discrete types of right-winger: the Right-Wing Nutjob (RWNJ) and the Right-Wing Authoritarian Psychopath (RWAP).
In that model, the RWAPs control the RWNJs by manipulating their rage and fear through propaganda that they either know to be false (e.g. climate change denial) or don’t give a rat’s ass about (abortion, the War on Christmas), and by misrepresenting and demonizing the opposition (Obama the Muslim Jihadist Socialist, the Welfare Takers, the 47%).
I’m not ready to totally reject this model. For example, I think the Koch Brothers and the Ken Lays of the world are thoroughgoing RWAPs, in the game for power and control, with vast wealth being valued primarily as a means to power. After all—what material goods or personal comforts can you buy with the ninth billion that you couldn’t afford with the first?
But I always assumed that the people on top of the right-wing political pyramid, those who have risen to leadership positions in Congress, for example, were likely to be pure RWAPs who fully knew what they were doing, laughing at the “useful idiots” as they manipulated them with their lies and distortions.
I thought of the Todd Akin, Richard Mourlock and Joe Walsh types as overachieving Useful Idiots whom the RWAPs could count on to energize the Nutjob base to get elected, and once in office to faithfully toe the party line, but that they were of a different species than the ones on top who ran things. The RWAPs on top would use them, reward them, and discard them as needed, all the while cynically manipulating them just as they manipulated their drooling base.
What I didn’t really understand was the degree to which the RWAPs have drunk their own Kool-Aid. Clearly, they really did believe that Obama had no chance of re-election. They think they can re-position themselves with the electorate by making token gestures to minorities and women. They think they can scare people into giving up their “entitlements” with talk of the fiscal cliff.
I think I need a more complex model to more accurately describe the Right. For one thing, the various pathologies seem not to be discrete, but to exist on continua. For example, one might have traits of both the RWNJ and the RWAP in varying degrees.
Take Willard Romney for example. Clearly both he and Queen Anne had drunk the Unskewed Poll Kool-aid. And he gives the appearance of being not just a devout Mormon, but a high-ranking member of the church hierarchy with all that entails, including the fact that Mormonism seems to countenance deception as long as it’s done in the name of a higher purpose.
These two belief sets are no doubt intimately intertwined in Willard—he may have been particularly vulnerable to mis-estimating his chances because he thought he was the One who had been called to the White House in fulfillment a Mormon prophecy. At the same time, he was willing to shape-shift as he thought necessary in order to gain power.
And although his own business career was clearly a checkered one from an outside perspective, he had rationalized his greed in his own eyes. Like many of the super-rich, he seems to have raised rule-breaking to the status of a virtue.
Who would want a CEO who lacked the acumen to bend the law to his own advantage wherever possible? And who would want a President who had lacked the wit to avoid paying his taxes? Of course one might have to hide the evidence of some of these virtues from the lower classes, who are endemically incapable of understanding these finer points—just as a Mormon missionary might have to conceal his true intentions from the potential converts in order to accomplish the greater good of bringing them into the Church.
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