Wingnut Victimology

 

Thomas Frank’s op-ed in the NY Times:

 

Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn’t have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed — along with front-page coverage.

Then again, what culture war offensive isn’t doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion.

Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party’s all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat — especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated — is the culture warrior’s very object.

The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote “no,” and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.

 

This really hits the nail on the head. The right’s sense of victimization is absolutely necessary to rally their faithful.  It’s the same thing, by the way, that fuels the islamic fundamentalists. Perceived humiliation. In her new book about terrorism, Jessica Stern writes:

 

To understand this, it is worth considering the causes of terrorism. Several possible root causes have been identified, including, among others, poverty, lack of education, abrogation of human rights, the perception that the enemy is weak-willed. I’ve been interviewing terrorists around the world over the past five years. Those I interviewed cite many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause of terrorism. But the variable that came up most frequently was not poverty or human-rights abuses, but perceived humiliation. Humiliation emerged at every level of the terrorist groups I studied — leaders and followers.

The “New World Order” is a source of humiliation for Muslims. And for the youth of Islam, it is better to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to this humiliation. Part of the mission of jihad is to restore Muslims’ pride in the face of humiliation. Violence, in other words, restores the dignity of humiliated youth. Its target audience is not necessarily the victims and their sympathizers, but the perpetrators and their sympathizers. Violence is a way to strengthen support for the organization and the movement it represents.

The word humiliation, alas, is now coming up in Iraq as well. Baghdad is of profound symbolic importance to Muslims because it was the capital of the Islamic world during the golden age of Islamic civilization. Televised pictures of American soldiers and their tanks in Baghdad are a “deeply humiliating scene to Muslims,” explains Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, who calls the war in Iraq a “gift” to Osama bin Laden.

 

The GOP and its corporate masters have successfully used this perceived humiliation of the “salt of the earth” red staters for cynical, manipulative reasons for decades.  It has consolidated the power of the real elites by scapegoating “cosmopolitans” and modernity as the cause of the average Joe’s problems.  But, just like their counterparts in places like Saudi Arabia, in this process they have found it useful and necessary to empower racists, paranoids and religious fundamentalists, some of whom have violent tendencies.

 

This scheme is about to blow up the House of Saud to its own detriment and everybody elses. We’ve got to  short circuit it here. That means that the humiliation factor has to be neutralized.