I know it’s hard to accept, but they really believe this stuff
by digby
Ed Kilgore hits the nail on the head again. Conservatives aren’t just power mad for the sake of holding power:
[W]here I part company with Cassidy and a lot of other progressive and/or neutral observers who wonder, as Barack Obama put it, when “the fever” might break, is that I don’t think this is just about conservative inability to think straight about how to win elections. History is littered with “lost” political causes that inspire intense loyalty and far outlive their practical usefulness. For one thing, while you might think of politics as a matter of winning the next election so your “team” can implement its immediate agenda, intensely ideological people tend to think of politics as a matter of winning wars rather than battles, and focus on winning elections that put them into the position to radically change history. And for another, some people express themselves politically in order to vindicate minority points of view—e.g., that the United States is in the midst of a “Holocaust” against unborn babies that’s not fundamentally different from what the Nazis did—whether or not they ever prevail.
So the best way to understand the contemporary conservative movement is as a coalition with an unusually large number of people who either don’t agree with the CV on how to win elections, don’t care about short-term political implications, or don’t care about anything other than expressing their opinion about the hellwards direction of the Republic and perhaps of the human race. Mix in another significant number of people with a large pecuniary interest in reactionary politics, and you have a movement that’s not going to turn from its current trajectory with any great speed. You can stamp your feet or call them crazy people or deplore their impact on the level of discourse all you want, but they just aren’t going away, and we might as well get used to it instead of marveling about it as though it came out of nowhere and will soon disappear.
I know this makes liberals unhappy. It makes me unhappy. These folks are not just going to wake up one morning and realize they need to “moderate” because they are losing political clout. Anyone who thinks that completely misunderstands these people and their movement.
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