What’s going on in the Election?

I think that the right is issuing a dying primal scream. The central question has become [to me!]: why is it that conservatives do not want to conserve, but to change. The answer is found somewhere in the notion that they are deeply frustrated with the failure of their agenda. Don’t forget that theirs has been the dominant ideology for three decades now. Were it to work, it would have done so by now. Yet everywhere they look the conservatives see failure. They have failed to re-assert religious values [evolution; gay rights; abortion]. Markets have failed to deliver health care affordably to all. The government even had to intervene in the housing market [a centerpiece of their “ownership society”] to save its catastrophic collapse. And so on. So with these failures of their agenda so abundant they lash out. And they double up on the ferocity of their beliefs. This is why political discourse is so poisoned. It is why old fashioned compromise is dead [temporarily]. In these extreme moments it is no consequence to lie. Or distort. Or hold many diametrically opposed views at once [is it really possible for social conservatives to embrace a unwed teenage pregnant mother, without abandoning their dogma? Apparently yes!]

To me cultural wars are a foolish exercise anyway. There is the way of reason: science, learning, and diversity of opinion; and there is the way of faith: dogma, resistance, reaction, authoritarianism and closed minds. Societies can go in either direction. The trajectory is not determined by economic conditions so much as by educational standards. The clash in America is between local, family, parochial tribal thinking and global, open, diverse and expansive thinking. Neither party stands clearly on the globalist side [trade restrictions are a mantra of the democrats]. But the GOP is more clearly on the parochial side. But the world is opening up. they are on the wrong side of history at the moment. Which feeds their anger.

America has always suffered from bouts of religious fervency. This last bout coincided with a reaction to the social “depravity” of the 1960’s. For many folks back then the educated elite [the anti-war protesters etc] represented an anti-American movement away fro values like patriotism and family. Their counter movement was embodied in the increasingly extreme religious and racial underpinnings of the modern post-Reagan GOP. That fervency is now abating. Other issues have become more important: inequality that includes white people as well as minorities; the weakening of the “American Dream”; the rising cost of living compared with the falling rate of wage increases etc. So the social agenda has slipped in importance. The social conservative alliance with big business and the libertarians has fractured. Libertarians think that the social conservatives have gone too far and are invasive; corporate America is pragmatic and needs quiet and a global reach within which to earn profits. So the Reagan coalition is falling apart. Only the zealots are left. But they are more dangerous for being alone: they are not mitigated by those other factions. Now they can set the entire GOP direction unhindered by those partners.

Couple the global influence eroding the meaning of locality and the shift in basic issue importance [the two are related of course], and the GOP’s ideological grip is loosened. I don’t think the country realizes this explicitly, but I do think the anger we see in the right is explained by this: they came close to victory. This era was theirs and yet they failed to cement their victory. This election is their last chance before Reaganism fades away. They have to win at all costs. I have described them elsewhere as Leninist. They are willing to destroy everything to save it. They have become the Taliban.

Hence the lying, the negativity, and the total lack of agenda.

The conservatives want to change: they want to change the current course of history. [Note to self: this is not a Hegelian position; there is no logic to history!]