Resolve

we are days away from the election, and i can barely contain myself. obsessively trawling all my favorite blogs, i rejoice in every sign of a bush slippage and despair at any sign that kerry is losing ground. i've never cared so much about the outcome of an election. every time i hear someone blather that the choice of our national leader is little more than a personality contest, a tide of bile sours my throat.

we treat it as a personality contest, and our media certainly contributes to the horse race fury of it. however, these choices *are* important. they reveal the heart of our country, its aspirations, and its values. the candidates themselves may only be the surface onto which the voters project themselves, but those projections reveal us in ways we hardly know.

i wish our system were different. i think we'd have more of an engagement with our civic responsibilities if our form of government allowed more flexibility in political representation. i hate the electoral college. basically, i hate winner-take-all in everything except poker. our system runs the risk of mutual radicalization, the dangers of which mrs. robinson, a commentor at orcinus, discusses with more eloquence than i could manage:

Breathtaking, Dave. But we've come to take that for granted from you.

I've got a quibble with your dissection of Paxton's fourth point, though. You write:

"Obviously, this meme does not appear among liberals in any shape (nor for that matter among any non-movement conservatives, except for the extremists of the racist and Patriot far right). Indeed, it's difficult to even find a liberal mirror to the conservative argument, to wit, that conservatives are at the root of all the nation's ills."

You work overtime to maintain a very carefully measured and balanced journalist's voice. But, still, I find this statement just a bit disingenuous. Faithful readers of "Orcinus" are well aware that you are not without a point of view -- and that your POV comes very close to refuting the above assertion.

Taken as a whole, your work provides strong evidence that we should start looking at conservatism -- or, at least, the far-right authoritarianism that now passes itself off as conservatism -- as a social pathology. It may not yet be "at the root of all the nation's ills," but it's certainly a factor in creating the fear and division that grip us today.

Of course, you're far from alone in providing support for this meme. Quite a few psychologists, sociologists, and other "liberal intellectual elite" types have produced a growing body of studies (I'm working on a list, and welcome submissions to it) that point to the notion that conservatism can seriously be considered as a personal and social pathology.

Here's a thumbnail summary of some of the studies I've seen so far. On a personal level, conservatives are personally more fearful, more reactive, and more suspicious of others. Phyisologically, fear reactions tend to suppress rational thinking, so these people are more likely to act out of emotion rather than reason (and to demonize those who refuse to let go of reality to join them in their hysteria). Movement conservatives also tend on average to have attended lower-quality schools, completed fewer years of education, and have done far less traveling abroad. (There's a reason they call it "liberal eduation.")

When conservatives come together to express these traits in their religion and their politics, the results are equally unhealthy. A quick trip through your own archives provides a very damning catalog of this behavior.

Taken together, this "reality-based" body of data could easily support a lively liberal argument that conservatism is a cancer on the body politic -- one that needs to be excised for the health of the republic.

Right now, I think most of us are too broad-minded to embrace this idea with the fervor of true believers. We're just not wired that way. But we are swayed by reason and science. If liberals become the regular targets of brownshirt violence -- increasing our own levels of fear and unreason -- the temptation to demonize them as "unfit for democracy" could become overwhelming.

We've already got everything required to launch a liberal eliminationist counter-meme. All that's missing is the will. And all it would take is another stolen election to shred what's left of our long liberal patience, freeing us to find that will.

It's not far-fetched, and not at all far out of reach of where we are now.

mrs. robinson's comments are in response to this post, one in a series on pseudo-fascism in 'movement conservatism' that david has been writing for several weeks. everytime i read a self-serving, smug comment from an evangelical christian (such as charlie, a frequent visitor at political animal) regarding his or her plans for america upon george bush's re-election, i find myself waging an internal battle not to hate christians. my own bigotry could become my worst enemy. i think this is why i long to live in another country where religion is a far more subdued feature of public life.

but i realize that it would be cowardly to run. it wouldn't help diffuse the power of american fundamentalism. the sense of defeat would poison the relief i'd feel. i fear the specter of a nuclear iran, but i fear more the specter of a nuclear-armed fundamentalist government here. that promises a global nightmare. i can run, but i can't hide.