Collective Conscious

Benen asks:

There’s some­thing fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent about how the left and right approach par­ti­san rage, at least in the mod­ern era, and there’s value in under­stand­ing why.

I remem­ber Kevin Drum had an item about a year ago, describ­ing the “surge” in con­ser­v­a­tive nut­ti­ness in the Obama era. At the time, he chalked it up to two main prob­lems: (1) “con­ser­v­a­tive nut­balls” are larger in num­ber than the lib­eral fringe; and (2) the “con­ser­v­a­tive lunatic brigade appeared so god­damn fast.”

He gives some rea­sons why, but none of them seem to be root causes; they all seem to be inter­me­di­ate char­ac­ter­is­tics of the con­ser­v­a­tive fringe that make them so vis­i­ble. I have some more fun­da­men­tal thoughts.

The nut­ti­ness of the right is based on a phi­los­o­phy of aggres­sion, xeno­pho­bia, hype, power, and money. This hap­pens to be just the sort of atti­tude that gets you ahead in the busi­ness world — so the right’s polit­i­cal extrem­ists are, in many ways, very main­stream busi­ness­men. They are rich and, con­se­quently, influ­en­tial. See the recent Koch hub­bub for a prime example.

The left’s cra­zies tend to live in the woods run­ning com­munes, often grow­ing or exper­i­ment­ing with psy­choac­tive drugs, and eschew­ing the worldly vices of money and tech­nol­ogy. We don’t hear much from them.

In this sense, the col­lec­tive think­ing exhib­ited by the left is a real imped­i­ment to their polit­i­cal vis­i­bil­ity. If true hard­core lib­er­als had the inde­pen­dent mind­set and finan­cial resources avail­able to the right’s extrem­ists, I think we would see a lot more of them suc­cess­ful in busi­ness and in this sort of pol­i­tics. But no; when lib­er­als have busi­ness suc­cess, they tend to share the wealth through arrange­ments like union­iza­tion, employee own­er­ship, or non­profit sta­tus rather than hand­ing it in epic pro­por­tions to CEOs and PACs.

(Photo: monkey_​bob99x)