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You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

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You are here: Home / Well-hung and snow white tan

Well-hung and snow white tan

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After reading Corey Robin’s book, I am pretty convinced that much of contemporary American conservatism is based on the idea of a restoration or counter-revolution.  And that is indeed the reason Teahadists don’t like the idea of compromise, as Ed Kilgore puts it:

But the most important source of rigidity is conservative ideology itself, which does not aim (as do most European conservatives) at “moderating” or countering the bipartisan policies of the past or the Democratic policies of the present, but aspires to a counterrevolution that “restores” what conservatives regard as immutable principles of good government and even culture.

Many of you have pointed out the similarities between Burke on Marie Antoinette and Rich Lowry on Sarah Palin:

(Burke) I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.

(Lowry) By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

Peggy Noonan on Reagan’s foot strikes me as similar:

I first saw President Reagan as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little …frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.

So does G. Gordon Liddy on W:

And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those — run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America.

In all cases, there’s a fixation with the leader’s physical persona and its sexy/magical/Godlike qualities. Here’s my question: given that restorations were typically about putting a royal back in charge of the country, that royals have some special divine quality, is it reasonable to think that wingers who want a counter-revolution/restoration will tend to focus on their leaders’ sexy/magical/Godlike qualities?

Reader Interactions

154Comments

  1. 1.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    Poor people don’t give a shit about this inside baseball. Stop being a dudebro brogressive dbag, DougJ!

  2. 2.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    Poor people don’t give a shit about this inside baseball. Stop being a dudebro brogressive dbag, DougJ!

  3. 3.

    Trollhattan

    Jesus, I’d never seen that Nooners quote before–she’s worse than I thought, which didn’t seem possible. Jesus.

  5. 5.

    Turgidson

    Noonan also called GWB a “steely-eyed rocket man.” Her public crushes on GOP daddy figures are…creepy.

  8. 8.

    shelly

    I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.

    Sweet Jesus. I mean, ….honestly.

  11. 11.

    Desargues

    I hate reactionary fuckers as much as you, Doug, or worse. But why go for this overarching explanation when there are particular ones? Rich just wanted to slip Klondike Barbie the soft sausage; Liddy has adequacy issues; Nooners had a weird crush (remember Condi’s slip of the tongue–when she said “my husband,” referring to Jorge Arbusto?)

    Burke is just too far away from us to know what the fuck he was thinking with respect to the physical person Marie Antoinette.

  14. 14.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @DougJ: It comes out the NSA threads where some of the commenters have decided that it is a coffee house liberal issue, that it smacks of white privilege, and anyone concerned about it is a dudebro.*

    *You really didn’t want to know.

  18. 18.

    MikeJ

    @Turgidson:

    Noonan also called GWB a “steely-eyed rocket man.”

    That one is particularly sickening. Steely-eyed rocket man actually means something, and isn’t a title that’s handed out lightly.

  19. 19.

    jonas

    And then of course there’s all the projection, where they imagine that liberals fetishize Obama the same way they do their leaders and that it’s *Democrats* who are in thrall to some kind of Führerprinzip, etc., etc. Like I said…so much projection.

  20. 20.

    shelly

    He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America.

    Guess again, Gord-O. At that time I still had some lingering hopes for Bush’s presidency. (Taught by my mother, ‘respect the office, if not the man.) But that little bit of shameless theater sealed the deal. Respect for this buffoon? Gone.

  21. 21.

    Botsplainer

    @C.V. Danes:

    I always thought the penultimate conservative manifesto was The Handmaid’s Tale…

    Nope – “If This Goes On” is it, read in reverse.

  22. 22.

    Trollhattan

    @jonas:

    Riding crop and kneehigh boots, also, too. Lord, think I just popped an embolism. If Cruz isn’t the embodiment of evil, then I clearly don’t know evil.

  24. 24.

    Ash Can

    I’m going to forget I ever saw this post. And I am not going to read any of the comments.

    I’m off now to find something to settle my stomach.

  25. 25.

    Corner Stone

    It sure seems like there’s a lot of sexual tension on this blog lately. Is it the holidays? The thought of wrapping a well oiled forearm across the windpipe of traitors, pulling them back against you until their feet are just off the ground and slowly, oh so slowly squeezing the life out of them until they lack the air to beg for their miserable, pathetic lives? Or maybe it’s the new Pope?
    Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure I can’t be the only one typing on this thread who’s naked.

  26. 26.

    Cacti

    And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those — run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America.

    I thought it was the sock in his crotch that really won them over.

  27. 27.

    McJulie

    You go run those — run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s closeted gay male’s vote in the United States of America.

    Somebody had to do it.

    Right wing thinking has a strong streak of essentialism running through it — gender essentialism, race essentialism, class essentialism. In their eyes, a person can be a great thinker without ever thinking a great thought, be a great leader without ever leading greatly, be a good person even if everything they actually do is evil.

    This is one area where the political right and the religious right are in full agreement: the esoteric essential characteristics of a person matter more than anything they actually say or do. Vigorous defense of “correct” ideas is more important than striving for improved actual outcomes — in fact, is more important than following those ideas in one’s own life.

    (For example: Ted Haggard could cheat on his wife with male prostitutes, and the right wing continued to welcome him as their own because he continued to proclaim that being gay was just wrong. Had he changed his mind about gay rights, THAT would have marked him as unredeemable.)

  29. 29.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    @Corner Stone:

    Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure I can’t be the only one typing on this thread who’s naked.

    I savored your comment, breathing in its pungent message, wrapping my mind around it gingerly before pulling it firmly into my hungry consciousness.

    Thank you.

  30. 30.

    Lawrence

    Peggy Noonan is insane. I don’t care if that foot fetish manifesto was genuine or constructed. How can people have such thoughts? There is no real human being living, dead, or yet to come who could truly deserve that hero worship. They all think they are living in a Jerry Bruckheimer film.

  32. 32.

    piratedan

    anybody want to do a roundup of liberal blogs talking about what the country needs and how to make it happen rather than another roundup of the Conservative circle-jerk du juor?

  33. 33.

    kindness

    @Cacti: There is no way Dubya wasn’t packing something other than the au natural in his codpiece in that flight suit. That in and of itself is such a jerk move, well….I just can’t explain how shocked I was that so many fell for the show. Especially Chris Mathews. That man wanted to go down on dubya like Lowry wanted any part or Bible Spice he could get his rancid tongue on.

    Yea, there is a bunch of sexual inuendo around. Must be the season.

  34. 34.

    rikyrah

    These mofos didn’t open their fucking mouths as we built up a deficit because of:
    1. Tax cuts
    2. Two lied into wars off the books
    3. Medicare Part D

    they didn’t open their fucking mouths about the deficit until a Black man became President.

    they can have a stadium full of seats

  35. 35.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    @piratedan:

    anybody want to do a roundup of liberal blogs talking about what the country needs and how to make it happen

    Good luck getting real progressives, poor people, dudebros and brogressives to agree on anything.

  37. 37.

    Glocksman

    I’m not surprised at all to read Liddy’s quote after reading his autobiography Will.

    At 13, I thought Liddy was a genuine badass and someone to emulate after reading it.
    At 46, I see the authority worship he has for what it is and feel vaguely ashamed for ever admiring him.

  40. 40.

    Duke York

    I think you’re completely right with thinking conservatives are American royalists. Ayn Rand’s work is simply the Divine Right of Kings written by an atheist.

  41. 41.

    Corner Stone

    @piratedan: Which liberal blogs did you have in mind? Atrios is too pithy and content free. Digby is a real downer. GOS is all over the place. FDL is in bed with Grover and loves him en toto. And LGM has Cooties now that Scott Lemieux has weighed in on the NSA “likely unconstitutional” ruling.
    That leaves BooMan and I can round up what he’s saying in one word, “slurp”.

  42. 42.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    @Glocksman:

    This one’s for all the Glocksmen about 46..

    Who’ve ever had a broken heart
    Who’ve wished upon a shooting star
    You’re beautiful the way you are

  44. 44.

    kc

    I would almost swear that years ago, I read an article by Noonan in which she said that on her first encounter with Nancy Reagan, Nancy looked her up and down and then literally sniffed. But I can’t find that passage now on the Google. Well, at least not on the first two pages of my searches.

    I don’t really have a point here . . .

  47. 47.

    boatboy_srq

    restorations were typically about putting a royal back in charge of the country, that royals have some special divine quality

    Count me among those who, in 2006-8, were half-expecting Shrub to declare some state of national emergency and suspend the ’08 election, and were snarking about George III (Washington, GHWB, and then Shrub), this sounds remarkably what that half-expectation was based upon.

    @shelly: We always knew Nooners had a fetish for St. Ronnie – we just didn’t know it was a foot fetish – until now.

    @hildebrand: Sounds more to me like they took writing lessons from Rand.

  49. 49.

    rikyrah

    They lived in a world where they believed the world of Mad Men was real.

    That they were some big fish in a big pond.

    When, in actuality, they were the only fish in a pond where 95% of the rest of the fish were crammed into sardine cans.

    but now, that 95% is out, they’re swimming in the pond, they’re just as good as them, and they don’t give two shyts about them.

    They see, with the election of President Barack Obama, the end of their world.

    This Black man with his Black wife and his Black children live in the White House.

    And, they’re shook.

    Totally shook.

    I’ll say it again..

    60% of White folks voted for Willard Romney.

    And it didn’t even fucking matter because the non-Whites in this country, with the 40% of White folks with sense, told them to go somewhere and sit down.

    It wasn’t even close.

    They played the Southern Strategy one last time, and got 60% of White folks…

    and, it didn’t matter – they were stomped in the popular vote and electoral vote.

    Add into it, Barack Hussein Obama became President – TWICE – without needing one fucking Southern state. It was nice that he won the ones he did, but he’d still be President without a square foot of the territory known as Dixie.

    They shook about that too.

  50. 50.

    Flying Squirrel Girl

    @Cacti: I forget where I read it, but the description of Dubya strutting on the aircraft carrier was the first time I’d ever seen the word “mooseknuckle” before.

  52. 52.

    kc

    @The Red Pen:

    This is why:

    You may contribute by check. Make checks payable to “Southern Heritage 411 Inc.”

    Please send your contributions via mail to:

    H.K. Edgerton
    71 Buffalo St
    Asheville NC 28806

    OR

    Southern Heritage 411 Inc.
    P.O. Box 220
    Odum GA 31555

  53. 53.

    Glocksman

    @hildebrand:

    Especially if you change ‘brown cordovan’ to ”black spike pump’.
    Then again, it seems as if there are a lot of Repubs with sex issues.

  54. 54.

    Corner Stone

    Maybe it was the constant references to circle jerks and bukkake by Dudebro Brogressive Brother Cassidy last night, or just something in the blog air, but I am reallllyyy randy right now.
    Where’s Botsplainer when you need someone to give a good off the cuff account of Hellfire missiles screaming in to impale some homosexual in a beachside cabana in Brazil? Fire, blood, guts, pitiable and miserable cries for help as they bleed out.
    Ahhhh, that’s the stuff!

  55. 55.

    Amir Khalid

    In that quote, Peggy Noonan isn’t worshiping Ronald Reagan’s foot, unless it was made of brown cordovan leather. She’s worshiping his shoe. Incidentally, Wikipedia tells me that cordovan leather comes from a horse’s ass.

  56. 56.

    the Conster

    What horrible stunted petty suck-ups conservatives are. Conservatism isn’t an ideology at all, it’s middle school spitballing writ large.

  59. 59.

    Glocksman

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:

    Thanks, I feel better. :)

    Seriously though, the book is disturbing on a number of levels, including his early childhood Hitler worship, his efforts (failed) to be deliberately sent to combat during Korea,to his search for a ‘genetically compatible’ wife, and his willingness to both kill Jack Anderson and to be killed in order to protect Richard Nixon’s political career.

    He’s motivated and nuts.
    That’s scary.

  60. 60.

    Grung_e_Gene

    Glenn Beck: Nice to meet you, sir. Tell me, tell me your thoughts on progressivism.

    Paul Ryan: Right. What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in there on Primus Magazine, you can get them on my Facebook page, what I’ve been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it’s really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.

    Glenn Beck: I love you.

    “Ryan’s selection sent a jolt of electricity, and the conservative base, including myself, were energized by it. In one week, he’s become a national sex symbol.” Sean Hannity

  61. 61.

    scav

    Not just the king, but also “My Redeemer Liveth”

    (and not only will fix evetything at a single swell foop without all the hard effort on my part, but also loves me best above the rest of his creation, so there!)

  62. 62.

    piratedan

    @Corner Stone: well there’s stonekettle station, the nation, angry bear, driftglass but yeah, when I think on it, we’re seriously lacking sites where we have a good discussion on how to help each other out other than getting involved with our local politics. I guess I can still admit that I need to be better eductaed on so many issues its hard to know where to begin in regards to rolling back the tide of privititization of education and other government services, where can we talk about the integration of wind, solar and hydroelectric into a modified energy grid that will hopefully be more efficient and cheaper. How and where do we talk about the management of our own filth and the cleaning and treatment of our water. I know I’m just scratching the surface. I’d talk about this on my own blog but I kinda stopped updating it because i’m not half the writer that I wish I was :-)

  65. 65.

    rikyrah

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    .

    @rikyrah: Do you include MSM in the they?

    Actually, I do.

    Steve Benen did a weekly column about the lies of Willard Romney and the MSM held Willard’s jock so obviously, it’s ridiculous.

    One of the most important stories was GOP Voter Suppression and I could name on less than 2 hands the people in the MSM told the story of GOP Voter Suppression. The rest of the MSM couldn’t do the ‘ both sides do it’, because it was obvious that it was GOP VOTER SUPPRESSION.

    They would have kept their mouths shut and if Willard had won would have been ‘ oh, you Black people, stop complaining..we don’t know what you’re talking about this voter suppression whining.’

  68. 68.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    @Glocksman: I always liked Liddy. He’s enough of a raconteur to make me overlook all the criminal and psychopathic stuff.

  69. 69.

    Trollhattan

    @The Red Pen:

    Hey, all that stars & bars bunting costs REAL MONEY. (Would say it “doesn’t grow on trees” but it just might. The South has this thing about trees.)

  71. 71.

    schrodinger's cat

    @rikyrah: I think Obama’s main problem has been that he has had to fight on two fronts GOP and the MSM. Its not that there is nothing to criticize about the Obama administration but the MSM fixates on utter trivialities like the press photographer access issue in the recent weeks.

  72. 72.

    Belafon

    And think about this from their tendency to project: They are always attacking the Obama’s for their looks as well as the color of their skin, and always accusing Democrats of wanting to make Obama a king or dictator.

  77. 77.

    negative 1

    @boatboy_srq: I had a history teacher in high school who opined that much of history for any culture could be broken down into a search for a man on a white horse to save the troubled nation. Also, that rarely worked out well.

  82. 82.

    bemused

    They live on fantasy and greed. Their convictions are wrapped in fantasy but at the core it always comes down to grabbing as much money as they can. If they really got every policy they wanted, it still wouldn’t be enough for them. All the opposition money raising would dry up so they’d have to go after each other which is already happening. I don’t think they know any other way to operate other than opposition with constant fund raising.

  83. 83.

    LAC

    “I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.”

    God, where was this drunk twit when this thought happened? Hanging on for dear life on a bar stool?

  88. 88.

    Chris

    @McJulie:

    Right wing thinking has a strong streak of essentialism running through it — gender essentialism, race essentialism, class essentialism. In their eyes, a person can be a great thinker without ever thinking a great thought, be a great leader without ever leading greatly, be a good person even if everything they actually do is evil.
    …
    This is one area where the political right and the religious right are in full agreement: the esoteric essential characteristics of a person matter more than anything they actually say or do. Vigorous defense of “correct” ideas is more important than striving for improved actual outcomes — in fact, is more important than following those ideas in one’s own life.

    Great point.

    This is where their culture-based outlook on the world, which has Samuel P. Huntington in spades, comes in – and why it’s fucked up and useless. They imagine cultures (Islamic, Latin America, wev) as having some sort of “essential” qualities – monolithic, immutable, widespread throughout that culture – and imagine that you can draw conclusions simply from those “essential” characteristics (e.g. “Islam is incompatible with democracy and that’s why the Arab Spring will fail,” “Latin Americans lack our Protestant Work Ethic and that’s why it’s a disaster that we’re being invaded by them,” etc). They can’t understand the fact that “cultures” come with millions of internal divisions, that they’re constantly evolving and reinventing themselves – etc.

    It’s also where their fetish for “American Exceptionalism” comes from. America, too has an “essence” (some weird amalgamation of Ayn Rand, the Founding Fathers and the baby Jesus) and that is what they ultimately worship, not “America” the actual country of 300 million people. The constant freakouts about the country’s evolution are because they see it as a corruption of that pure essence – and since in their world countries and cultures don’t evolve/reinvent themselves, it’s also a foreign contamination.

    TL/DR: the Republican worldview is Star Trek (the Vulcan race is motivated by Logic! The Klingon race is motivated by Honor! The Ferengi race is motivated by Greed!), assumed to be applicable to real life.

  89. 89.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    @Mnemosyne:

    In my experience, women tend to be somewhat less impressed by alpha-male dick wagging than men are.

    I want you to revisit that thought in 48 hours.

  90. 90.

    Mnemosyne

    @Glocksman:

    I’m not that surprised that 13-year-old boys would read about Liddy and think he was, like, totally cool, man. Did you read his story about holding his hand over an open flame to show he was impervious to pain? And he says you can kill someone with a pencil!

    It’s the guys who held onto their Liddy worship past adolescence that worry me.

  93. 93.

    slippytoad

    If it was possible for me to have a lower opinion of Peggy Noonan, I just got there. I cannot believe how pathetic these people are.

    It is painfully clear to me that conservatives do not comprehend, or respect, or deserve a democracy. They want to be spoon-fed their daily activities by a lord and master. I wish they would just fuck off to whatever corrupt third-world dictatorship pleases them.

  94. 94.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Chris:

    TL/DR: the Republican worldview is Star Trek (the Vulcan race is motivated by Logic! The Klingon race is motivated by Honor! The Ferengi race is motivated by Greed!), assumed to be applicable to real life.

    Well, just look at these people.

    Their greatest hero, ever, was a movie star, and not a terribly good one, mind you.

  95. 95.

    slippytoad

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    s not that there is nothing to criticize about the Obama administration but the MSM fixates on utter trivialities like the press photographer access issue in the recent weeks.

    Which is hilarious, because if and when a valid criticism ever emerges from the ass-crack of the MSM, I will likely ignore it due to the fact that I think they are all high-school children playing some fucking retarded social game that has zero relationship to the real world.

  96. 96.

    Davis X. Machina

    It is painfully clear to me that conservatives do not comprehend, or respect, or deserve a democracy.

    There’s a forelock-tugging gene just waiting to be expressed in all of our chromosomes.
    The ancien regime didn’t last as long as it did purely through force, violence and sermons on the divine origin of the monarchy.

    Democracy’s a heavy lift. It requires active, positive effort.
    The species defaults to hierarchy — and to inertia.

    This isn’t a good combination.

  97. 97.

    KG

    @boatboy_srq: there were some on the right that thought the same thing about Clinton in 98/99. I’m sure there will be some thinking it about Obama in 14/15.

    As for the whole “restoration project” conservativism, yeah, there’s a lot of that within the “movement.” That’s where the restoring the lost constitution stuff comes from. It’s where the Lochner Era worship comes from. It’s where the repeal the 17th Amendment stuff comes from. They really think that we are lost because we aren’t following the Founders’ intent. Of course, when confronted with the idea that the world today is vastly different than what the Founders’ dealt with (not to mention the fact that the US is in a completely different position of international power), they don’t have an answer beyond “but we are bound by what they wrote! if you don’t like it, change it!”

  99. 99.

    Mike in NC

    I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.

    OK, Peggy must have penned that after her fifth gin and tonic for lunch.

  100. 100.

    Desargues

    @Paul in KY: Um, I’d like to hear more. Was it just a general penchant to pity damsels in distress under Jacobinite duress, or does the doctrine dovetail with something about Marie Antoinette specifically?

  101. 101.

    Ben Franklin

    ” In my experience, women tend to be somewhat less impressed by alpha-male dick wagging than men are.”

    In my experience, was the proper anchor for your perspective.
    Size doesn’t matter, would have given it context in urban mythology.

  104. 104.

    Mike in NC

    @The Red Pen: I’ve seen an article about this guy. He’s a Civil War re-enactor who goes around the South giving talks about the black troops in the Confederate army, of which there were exactly none, but apparently he’s found a gig as an apologist for the CSA. Grifters gotta grift, as others are pointing out.

  106. 106.

    Mark S.

    I’ve got the flu, so I’m pretty immune to all this Ronnie–Nancy–Peggy threesome action. Normally, though . . .

  107. 107.

    Eric U.

    any rational person saw George Bush clowning around in that flight suit and worried for the U.S. and the world. And they also wanted him to loosen those parachute straps.

  108. 108.

    greenergood

    “he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those — run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America”
    No, he’s won the lurve of every bondage/codpiece/leather bar aficionado, plus a few ‘Take my Breath Away’ fans, and, oh, Paul Ryan as a sensitive teenager looking for a role model with ‘manly characteristic[s]’ Jeesh …

  114. 114.

    jl

    For all their great faults, I prefer reading Adams and Jefferson on aristocracy. But then I have class envy, and prefer reading about aristocracy as packs of ravenous self-destructive self-indulgent scoundrels willing to destroy everything for a moment of glory and power (Adams) or as fools (Jefferson).

    John Adams wrote quite silly stuff when he was in his high conservative mode, and it was seen as silly by many of his more (given the era) progressive Founder peers. From that poor imperfect clay, been mostly downhill for U.S. conservatism ever since. Good thing we had Adams and not Burke, though.

  116. 116.

    Chris

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    And, of course, they think “24” is a documentary and actually cite it to inform policy decisions.

    And they think the idyllic 1950s utopia they see on their TV screens was real.

    You know for people who hate Hollywood so much…

  117. 117.

    catclub

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: 1. the deepest circle of Hell is cold – ask Dante.
    2. There have been calculations based on the temperature of molten sulphur and how bright Heaven is, that Heaven is hotter than Hell.

    This is what happens when you give a physicist a T^3 radiation law.

  122. 122.

    fuckwit

    Krugman noticed this and wrote about it in “The Great Unraveling” back in 2003 or 2004. He noticed that the “conservative movement” is a radical vanguard, and not “conservative” at all, and totally unappeasable, they’ll keep moving the Overton Window, they’ll keep fighting until they’ve achieved total domination. He shouted from the rooftops about this danger for years, was called “shrill” (remember Brad DeLong’s “Holy Order of the Shrill… aieeeee!!” blog?), and mostly ignored until almost 10 years later when people finally started getting it. I guess the pundits and most of the electorate have only started figuriing it out 10 years later, with the government shutdown.

    This is one of the weirder and more annoying (or possibly valuable too?) things about democracy. It takes forever for any wisdom or knowlege or foresight/insight to percolate through 300 million people, before it becomes widely accepted knowledge, and only then can it affect election decisions, which lags another 2-6 years, and thus gets codified into law some years after that. Expect it to take 20-30 years to make any significant change to a democracy– or for it to respond to any really serious long-term threat. Democracies are NOT proactive…. not ever AFAICT.

    Also, too. c.f. civil rights, global climate change, etc.

  125. 125.

    ruemara

    Holy Christ on a Hillock.

    I first saw President Reagan as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little …frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads.

    Wow. I’d be dead of embarrassment if such a fawning bit of unbridled sexual urges came from my pen. And I’ve written songs of praise to beer, periods and the wonders of indoor plumbing. Wow. My eyes may need to be cleansed from the filth.

  126. 126.

    ruemara

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: Yeah, when brogressive dudebros mock us when we point out our concerns, yet somehow think we’re supposed to work with them when we’re just a fucking punchline of inadequately liberal enough morons who you still need to have vote for your candidates for them to win.

  127. 127.

    Keith G

    I assume there was a point being made.

    Conservatives ” tend to focus on their leaders’ sexy/magical/Godlike qualities?”

    Like various Kennedy or Obama?

  128. 128.

    Jebediah, RBG

    @jonas:

    Stick Ted Cruz in a uniform with a bunch of medals across his chest and some aviator mirror shades…… Dreamy!

    He’d still look just like Major Frank “Ferret-face” Burns.

  129. 129.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    @ruemara: Have you thought about reaching out to these people instead of using racial epithets and other demeaning language?

  130. 130.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    Never overlook sadism. More than anything else, American conservatism in the last 20 years has been politically organized sadism. That debate two years ago, where the audience cheered at the thought of some guy without health insurance dying? That’s modern American conservatism distilled to its purest essence. These people who screech about the debt and deficit will happily vote for laws they know will put us deeper in debt as long as it fucks some already defenseless, beleaguered group of unworthies hard enough. Poor ignorant teabag voters will happily vote for Koch brother toadies who are going to ream them up the ass, as long as somebody else gets reamed harder.

    Sadism is what gives modern American conservatism its meaning. What is their newest hero, Ted Cruz, really? He’s sadism personified. There are other aspects, but sadism is the big reason for conservativism’s being today.

  132. 132.

    Corner Stone

    @ruemara:

    who you still need to have vote for your candidates for them to win.

    Well, stay home then. See how that works out for you. Do you really want the conservative in office? How would that advance your cause? You think that would make it better?
    Some people…really…really. Lord I just can not even with some people.

  134. 134.

    MaximusNYC

    Wait… so the essential quality of American conservatism is its tendency to see things in essentialist terms?

    Let’s be careful here, folks…

  135. 135.

    Keith G

    @Mnemosyne: I don’t think there is anything in American history that matches that Putinesque performance by 43.

    Doug’s premise did not indicate that all manifestations of focusing “on their leaders’ sexy/magical/Godlike qualities” had to be that peerlessly over the top.

    Thank you for trying to change the focus.

  136. 136.

    Mnemosyne

    @Keith G:

    Doug’s premise did not indicate that all manifestations of focusing “on their leaders’ sexy/magical/Godlike qualities” had to be that peerlessly over the top.

    He included Noonan’s foot fetish moment, so I was pretty sure he was setting the bar quite high.

    Thank you for trying to change the focus.

    I didn’t want to think about Nooners’ foot fetish any more than you did, but it’s silly to pretend that there’s been anything written about Obama that clears that bar. Republicans stand alone when it comes to fetishizing their leaders — even the Kennedy 50th anniversary didn’t come close.

  137. 137.

    revrick

    @Duke York: Well, the mascot for U Va is the Cavalier and the Confederacy was enamored of the Cavalier ethic… you know, the guys who fought for King Charles I against the Puritan/Parliamentary forces. So, yeah.

  138. 138.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Desargues:

    Was it just a general penchant to pity damsels in distress under Jacobinite duress, or does the doctrine dovetail with something about Marie Antoinette specifically?

    Burke’s shtick is that the French Revolution is dehumanizing. The revolutionaries are turning people who ought to be considered special into animals, especially the women. He’s the one who said “the age of chivalry is dead.” For Burke, the French Revolution is overthrowing everything We know to be true, for instance, that gentlemen stand up for damsels in distress, that clergy deserve respect, and that when bad things happen to kings and queens in real life it’s appropriate to cry in the way you’ve been practicing for your whole life by watching tragedies. IOW, to be a leftist radical is to disrespect women and explode hierarchies that protect both the people on the top and the people on the bottom. (C.f. The Great Chain of Being)

    Whenever I teach Burke’s _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ I talk about how _The Lion King_ succeeds in making you cry about Mufasa’s death. Why is that bad? Not because of anything having to do with kings and princess and royal succession, which is what drives the whole plot. Not that, perish the thought. That’s all been obfuscated. No, the reason we cry is because a boy will be without his dad. It’s a dynastic story about the divine right of kings, really, but it’s been domesticated so you feel the pain and stress in an intimate way. Both Lion King and Burke take national tragedies and make them into domestic/familial ones. That’s the (demented, reprehensible) genius of conservative propaganda. It takes ideological and political issues and turns them into things you can identify with personally.

  140. 140.

    revrick

    @KG: The problem with the conservative notion that we have to get back to the Founders is that the Founders themselves fought tooth-and-nail over the interpretation of the Constitution 30 seconds after the ink was dry. Cf, Madison and Hamilton

  141. 141.

    Mnemosyne

    @FlipYrWhig:

    That’s the (demented, reprehensible) genius of conservative propaganda. It takes ideological and political issues and turns them into things you can identify with personally.

    That sounds like one of the bad reviews of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. ;-)

    I’m not sure I would class it as conservative propaganda, myself, but I guess I could see how some people could read it that way. But I’d rather have propaganda that humanizes people than propaganda that dehumanizes them.

  142. 142.

    Raven OnTheHill

    “In all cases, there’s a fixation with the leader’s physical persona and its sexy/magical/Godlike qualities.”

    Is this so different than what Obama’s supporters were saying, back in 2008, and sometimes still say? I even wrote a long series of posts about the impulse, back when.

    The image of the true king who will restore justice, is a powerful one, and given the rise of injustice in our time, it is I suppose, not surprising that it has become a popular one. This seems to me the political version of a romantic fantasy, and it carries all the risks of attempting to live out such fantasies in real life.

  144. 144.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Gex:

    See if you list it as $0.62/mile X 2, it doesn’t look at all like you are charging $1.22/mile.

    Or even $1.24.

    /never an arithmetic pedant until this very minute

  145. 145.

    Chris

    @fuckwit:

    This is one of the weirder and more annoying (or possibly valuable too?) things about democracy. It takes forever for any wisdom or knowlege or foresight/insight to percolate through 300 million people, before it becomes widely accepted knowledge, and only then can it affect election decisions, which lags another 2-6 years, and thus gets codified into law some years after that. Expect it to take 20-30 years to make any significant change to a democracy– or for it to respond to any really serious long-term threat. Democracies are NOT proactive…. not ever AFAICT.

    It’s not even that that pisses me off. It’s the fact that after a couple generations, a couple of mishaps and a little bit of well-placed propaganda, all that accumulated wisdom and knowledge can apparently be wiped out so we have to start all over again.

    Like, I understand why people from the Gilded Age and early 20th century would be slow to accept left-wing ideas – they were still new and being tested at the time. But good Lord, here we are a hundred years later, the left-wing ideas were tested, they brought shared prosperity beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and we’ve been getting steadily worse and worse since we’ve rejected them and slid back into the right-wing nonsense of a century ago. Exactly how fucking hard do you have to be hit over the head before it sticks?

  146. 146.

    Chris

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    “It’s sadism.” Yeah, the extent to which it comes down to that used to surprise me, until I realized how eminently logical it was.

    To survive and keep their privileges in an age of mass politics, the elites need a popular base of their own. They can’t create one by promising nice things – that would defeat the purpose. So instead they do it by mining the parts of human nature that’re much lower than self-interest – as you say, the sadism (whether the specific form is based on race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, or wev).

    When you spend fifty years appealing to the worst of humanity, you end up with a popular base made up of the worst humanity has to offer. And that’s your 27%.

  147. 147.

    The Raven on the Hill

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: I did. It was under a different ‘nym, and I was roundly condemned by Obama supporters in the discussion at the time. But it was still possible then to believe that Obama would pursue liberal programs. Because the reading of Obama’s campaign platform that discussion required, it became clear to me that he was what we now call a centrist, that is, between the true center and the radical right.

  149. 149.

    Chris

    @FlipYrWhig:

    On the whole “suffering of the rich and powerful made human” thing, Victor Hugo had a pretty good takedown of it towards the beginning of Les Miserables;

    “Louis XVII [the heir to the throne dead in revolutionary custody]? Who are you mourning for? For an innocent child? Then, good: I mourn with you. Or for the royal child? Then I have to think. For me, the brother of Cartouche, an innocent child hung until death for the sole crime of being the brother of Cartouche is no less painful than the grandson of Louis XV.”

    To take a less literary tack and on behalf of my other country, fuck that fucking British fuck and his opinion of our revolution. As Hugo points out, I don’t remember the Edmund Burkes of the world ever shedding a tear for all the arbitrary killings that happened before the revolution upset their precious fucking order. (If they had shed a tear and followed up on that, these revolutions wouldn’t have happened in the first place).

  150. 150.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Chris: Burke was a supporter of the Colonies’ cause during the American Revolution – it was a child of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Whigs triumphant. The French Revolution, though, it contained truly radical ideas. The populace mattered. A scary thought.

  151. 151.

    fuckwit

    @revrick: In many ways, the US Civil War was an extension of the British Civil War, an ocean away, and with the geography reversed: the children of the Scotsmen who’d settled in the South versus the children of the Englishmen who’d settled in the North.

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Trackbacks

  1. […] This entry at BJ caught my attention, because it’s all about the bizarre way wingnuts love the image of people, the idea of them, more than actual actual people (or ideas). Sarah Palin is starbursty. George W. Bush is awesome because he’s wearing a flight suit. Ronald Reagan has a really nice…foot. These folks fetishize the weirdest things, and place so much stock in appearances and symbolism and a sort of loud smarm. It really is sick and weird. […]