We are often reminded that with an honest understanding of others comes some sympathy and perhaps some small degree of respect.
Good God, I would like to think so.
But some attempts at empathy are fruitless. Others are not fruitless but merely thankless, the rewards being far too meager in comparison with the efforts made to build bridges. An example of a possibly thankless endeavor? Trying to understand the Right, the Conservatives, Republicans, Reactionaries, Neocons, whatever you prefer to call them.
But why try to understand them? To what end? How could we possibly profit from a better understanding of this wild and boisterously complex tribe?
Well, two reasons for making the effort immediately spring to mind. Firstly, the subject of the Right is a fascinating one, historically, psychologically, economically.. and biologically? And a better understanding of the worse excesses of the Right may help us creampuffs to better withstand their eternal attempts to mold the world in their puffed up image.
To begin (..and forgive me for this..) let’s start with a quick sociological history of the United States. America, to a large degree was founded by puritan religious fanatics fleeing deserved persecution in Europe, their greatest wish being to impose their harsh and totalitarian views on others and burn more witches in the New World. Our founding fathers, some two hundred years later, sick of religious squabbling and sobered, attempted to establish a union based on other more humane principals than divine revelation and retribution.
The early years of the United States were marked by a competition of fundamentally different ideas as espoused by Jefferson and Hamilton. Jefferson hated cities, money, political parties - while Hamilton pointed out you couldn’t run a country without banks, stable currency and a bureaucratic infrastructure. That the nation was soon further divided between an industrializing cheap-immigrant-labor-dependent North and an agricultural slave-based Southern economy, further split the country.
The Republican Party, partially founded by Lincoln, had as one of its pillars, the abolition of slavery. Lincoln was their first presidential candidate, but after Lincoln’s murder, the party quickly went astray, bought and corrupted by men made rich during the Civil War. From the 1870’s on the party became a coalition of rapacious big railroad, steel and oil interests in the east, smaller businesses in the Midwest, but pretty much non-existence in the South. Thirty years later Teddy Roosevelt made a valiant attempt to reform the Republicans, to fight brutal monopolies and trusts, to bring pure food and drugs laws, to establish national parks, and he accomplished much but failed at even more. Meanwhile the Democrat Party strength was with whites in the south who were working to keep the now-freed blacks from rising above their station – as well as with recent immigrants in the north-east who were struggling to organize unions.
Thirty more years would go by and Teddy’s distant cousin, Franklin, finally triumphed over the Republicans battered by the Depression. His Democratic party was revitalized by his building of a coalition of urban and rural workers, the unemployed, the poor, immigrants and minorities. His establishment of public work projects to give employment such as the W.P.A. helped get America back on its feet. For the next thirty years the Democrats further changed and strengthened America, with the establishment of Social Security, Medicare and the Federal enforcement of the end to segregation and black voter prevention in the South. Truman, Kennedy and Johnson further worked to purge racism from the Democratic Party.
The Right was out in the cold from 1933 to 1968 when Richard Nixon’s brilliantly cynical tactic, the so-called Southern Strategy, split the votes of the rural poor in the south, appealing as it did to white racists and die-hard segregationists as well as fundamentalist Christians. Thus strengthened, the Right in America was able to gain and hold power for much of the next 40 years.
America is a special country. While in most other industrialized and semi-industrialized countries, the poor and the working class are left-wing, supporting unions and leftists parties and policies. In America, the working class – at least in rural areas – is proudly right-wing. Why? Perhaps the tantalizing hope of the American Dream – You, too may some day be rich – propels the dreaming rural white poor into fearing taxation and government interference? “I may win the lottery some day and I don’t want the government to take it all to pay for my unemployment and health benefits today.” Such is the logic of the poor whites of the Red States. Naïve? Short-sighted… or very long-sighted?
The Right’s comtempt for Washington and politicians in general is easily explained. When you so often and so easily and so cheaply buy and corrupt politicians why should you respect them? Reason enough for the Right to proclaim its distrust of government (..but only when it is out of power.) The Right’s mantra is a scornful mocking of anything to do with Washington except for the military, the intelligence services, the prison system, or local or national police forces. You will never hear the Right criticize these institutions, except for occasional accusations that they may be showing a tendency towards namby pamby leniency when liberals are in office and at the helm. No, the Right is generally all about the gleeful and unashamed show of force. For them the Pentagon is a paragon and prisons are better expenditures than schools, and soldiers and cops better role models than teachers. Uniforms, whether they be football, SWAT team or Green Baret are symbols of unabashed masculine assertiveness.
Why? Why the love of power symbols?
The powerless rural whites have always and will always long for power, long for the symbols of power, toughness and invulnerability. Guns, gas-guzzling muscle cars. The N.R.A. and NASCAR have replaced the KKK. “We don’t whine – we brag, we shoot!”
Now, to be fair, some rural people do need to supplement their diets by hunting. And when you find your home being burgled repeatedly by meth-crazed predators and the nearest police station is 60 miles away, you, too may want to hide a 12 gauge under your bed.
And you may gladly and gratefully vote for Senators and Governors bought and paid for by mining and mineral interests, as these companies are often the sole employers for a hundred miles. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, my home town, the biggest employer and the only one paying a decent wage is Haliburton. No wonder the Right holds power in the rural states. They are often the only ones who actively ignore environmental and health laws in order to dig up the minerals and thus provide jobs. To tell the blue collar workers of the Red States they don’t know which side of their bread is buttered insults and does not convince them.
The master manipulators of the Right play the rural poor as if they are playing an organ. Emotionalism is the framework, combining blind high school football rah rah my-country-right-or-wrong patriotism, primitive religiosity, racism, fear, envy, anger, resentment. Into the awful blend is the incessant mocking of the weak, women, gays, minorities, in order to feel more manly, powerful and safe.
That there is also emotionalism on the Left is also true – and also something that evidences itself in primitive outbursts and frozen prejudices. But as the Leftist loyalists noted forlornly after losing to the Right-wing Franco in the Spanish Civil War, “They may have won but we had the best songs.”
There is more in this sad aside than otherwise might be realized. The proof that the Right is a twisted and stunted thing, a force for no good, is evidenced by the glaring fact that there is no such thing as great Right Wing music, art, literature, humor.. or anything celebrating humanity. The Left may stumble and occasionally do evil things, but the motivation comes from a good place, the desire for universal kindness, sharing and freedom. But when the Right does good, an exceedingly rare occurrence, it is usually for the wrong reasons and immediately regretted by them. “Do good? We don’t want to start looking like pussies now!”
Fear is a motivator and a unifier for the Right, just as it is for the Left. But while the Left fears environmental disaster, poverty, overpopulation, depleted resources, racism, sexism, xenophobia, war – the Right laughs at them. Instead the Right fears emasculation, taxes, bureaucracy, big (non-military) government, foreigners, and as H.L. Mencken once said of the Puritans, “They harbor the fear that someone somewhere may be happy..” if that someone is not of their own gated community.
The racism and xenophobia of the Right is a multifaceted thing. For example although the Right may fear blacks who are also poor, one can see an odd phenomenon in action. An African dictator, black as coal, who has robbed his nation blind, may well be welcomed with open arms by rich white racists in Palm Springs – for he is a thundering success, a self-made man.. and even better… he succeeded by massive cheating. A man to be truly admired!
For an honest understanding of the Right it helps to recognize the legitimacy of their fears, exaggerated or not. Right wing death squads throughout Latin America exist for a reason, the real fear and possibility that the landless poor will overwhelm the rich property owners, seize their lands and murder them in their beds – something Robert Mugabe has urged his poor black followers to do to the white ranchers of Zimbabwe. That the property-owning Right fears the poor is natural and understandable. But that they also despise the poor is less so. Perhaps in order not to weaken, to show sympathy, it’s necessary for the Right to also mock and scorn the poor. Sympathy is weakness – and weakness is a cardinal sin on the Right.
In many ways the followers of the Right are a more honest group, motivated by the most basic primative instincts. To fear the foreign, the different, is the same instinct that prevents us from putting unknown substances in our mouths. We distrust to survive. But to move on, to progress, takes exploration and an honest measurement of results. The Right fears change because they cannot control and rule it beforehand. Instead they seek only to consolidate their own gains.
Those on the Left who believe in kindness, sharing, progress, and envision a better future for mankind, operate out of hope. Those on the Right have no naïve optimism. They see all too much evidence (in themselves) that people are self-serving, treacherous and need to be herded and ruled with an iron hand. Alpha males must win and decide for the greater good of the herd. Sympathy is equated with vulnerability. Efforts to protect the environment, to improve health care, to ensure the basic human rights of minorities, women and homosexuals are all regarded as “Evil Liberal attempts to destroy America.”
Having recognized all this what can us so-called Progressives do to try to diminish the numbers of souls foolish enough to fall into the hands of the Right?
Very little, I imagine, as the rural poor white population need jobs, educational opportunities – and something other than the meager choice between the church, the saloon and the high school football game as gathering and unifying places.
The same with the black population of inner-city ghettos. As long as there are no jobs and the only gathering places are churches, bars and crack houses, poverty and crime will continue to rule.
But the sad fact is, when the Right looks at black ghetto life and the high proportion of crime, it smiles, confirmed in its belief that it is somehow more moral, clever, destined to rule, that blacks and other minorities are designed by the hand of a white God to be inferior.
And when we Lefties look at the worst excesses of the poor rural whites, the KKK supporters, the gun nuts, the snake handlers and the xenophobes, we are smugly confirmed in our beliefs that these are inferior souls, to be rightly despised and dismissed.
Until we can instead do something to change the reality of poor rural whites, the Right will continue to use them as voter fodder, canon fodder and general dupes. And as long as the military will take anyone, the rural poor will continue to praise it.
