They double down on the absolutism and purge their party in the process. Demanding purity, they lobby for a retrograde agenda. Weigel points to three planks in Maine’s new GOP platform:
- Return to the principles of Austrian Economics, and redirect the economy back to one of incentives to save and invest.
- Discard political correctness, make public the declaration of war (Jihad), made against the U.S. on 23 Feb 1998, and fight the war against the United States by radical Islam to win.
- Defeat Cap and Trade, investigate collusion between government and industry in the global-warming myth, and prosecute any illegal collusion
Get that? (1) Ron Paul monetary policy (2) declare holy war (3) criminalize science.
And they wonder why I call them names.
This personality type has a name: AUTHORITARIAN. One of the primary patterns of the authoritarian personality is psychological projection; authoritarians are generally the first to accuse someone of authoritarian motives because they are themselves authoritarian. The accusations may vary: statist, communist, fascist, socialist, Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, Rastafarian, Sleestak…the names may change, but the accusation is the same.
This is why Obama drives your typical wingnut crazier than a sprayed roach. His color, origins, background, etc. are places where wingnuts can invest their belief that he, and not they, are the authoritarian.
Furthermore, certain cultic groups on the right (and I include the John Birch Society here) promote these crazy theories for the very purpose of maintaining authoritarian politics in America. The more you study these outfits, the more closely they resemble their own caricature: globally-rooted, secretive, greedy, evil, and convinced of things that just don’t make any damn sense.
To learn more about the authoritarian personality, here’s a free book in .PDF format. It’s sourced and scientific and researched and everything. It also contains this disturbing passage, which I quote at length with emphasis added:
The next night 68 high RWAs showed up for their ride, just as ignorant of how they had been funneled into this run of the experiment as the low RWA students had been the night before. The game proceeded as usual. Background material was read, Elites (all males) nominated themselves, and the Elites were briefed. Then the “wedgies” started. As soon as the game began, the Elite from the Middle East announced the price of oil had just doubled. A little later the former Soviet Union (known as the Confederation of Independent States in 1994) bought a lot of armies and invaded North America. The latter had insufficient conventional forces to defend itself, and so retaliated with nuclear weapons. A nuclear holocaust ensued which killed everyone on earth–7.4 billion people–and almost all other forms of life which had the misfortune of co-habitating the same planet as a species with nukes.
When this happens in the Global Change Game, the facilitators turn out all the lights and explain what a nuclear war would produce. Then the players are given a second chance to determine the future, turning back the clock to two years before the hounds of war were loosed. The former Soviet Union however rebuilt its armies and invaded China this time, killing 400 million people. The Middle East Elite then called for a “United Nations” meeting to discuss handling future crises, but no agreements were reached.
At this point the ozone-layer crisis occurred but–perhaps because of the recent failure of the United Nations meeting–no one called for a summit. Only Europe took steps to reduce its harmful gas emissions, so the crisis got worse. Poverty was spreading unchecked in the underdeveloped regions, which could not control their population growth. Instead of dealing with the social and economic problems “back home,” Elites began jockeying among themselves for power and protection, forming military alliances to confront other budding alliances. Threats raced around the room and the Confederation of Independent States warned it was ready to start another nuclear war. Partly because their Elites had used their meager resources to buy into alliances, Africa and Asia were on the point of collapse. An Elite called for a United Nations meeting to deal with the crises–take your pick–and nobody came.
By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world–although we, like some battlefield news releases, are counting some of the corpses twice.
The authoritarian world ended in disaster for many reasons. One was likely the character of their Elites, who put more than twice as much money in their own pockets as the low RWA Elites had. (The Middle East Elite ended up the World’s Richest Man; part of his wealth came from money he had conned from Third World Elites as payment for joining his alliance.) But more importantly, the high RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to their own group. They too were all reading from the same page, but writ large on their page was, “Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together.”
The high RWAs also suffered because, while they say on surveys that they care about the environment, when push comes to shove they usually push and shove for the bucks. That is, they didn’t care much about the long-term environmental consequences of their economic acts. For example a facilitator told Latin America that converting much of the region’s forests to a single species of tree would make the ecosystem vulnerable. But the players decided to do it anyway because the tree’s lumber was very profitable just then. And the highs proved quite inflexible when it came to birth control. Advised that “just letting things go” would cause the populations in underdeveloped areas to explode, the authoritarians just let things go.
Yeah.
These people are not very Christian, which is why they work so hard to maintain the appearance of Christianity. Insofar as they believe in God, it is inspired by fear; and fear — along with stupid ideas, lies, and ugliness — is all they have to offer right now. In America, they mostly do this by maintaining a “right to life” that ends at birth; and they like birth, because the more there are to suffer with them the merrier.
Put them in charge and you will see the world tilt towards destruction. We’ve already seen it.
