Think of this as Volume 15, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
In last week's piece on the Crazy I tried to put what's going on with the Right in an historic context.
This week I want to put it into a personal context.
Consider. What if everything you were taught was true, all of your life, was suddenly revealed to be false? What if the assumptions by which you lived turned to quicksand?
You'd be pretty crazy too.
Back in 1971, when I was 16, I was sent to some academic event in upstate New York, and stayed at the “host home” provided by my school. It was a beautiful home, and the people within it beautiful people. But they were troubled. They were angry. They were liberals, and everything around them was collapsing.
I was, at the time, a conservative, and debated with the head of household far into the night. This decent, and self-evidently prosperous man was crazy mad at Nixon, at all his works (real and imagined). He couldn't credit the man's liberal actions (the EPA, CPSC, OSHA), insisting he was pushed into it by a Democratic Congress. (He was.) All he saw was the rhetoric, the war (which Nixon inherited from LBJ, I pointed out), and Nixon's professed hatred of academics, which he termed a personal threat.
It was like this, I finally realized. This man had grown up on liberalism. FDR was always the President. Republicans were evil incarnate, either pro-Nazi, isolationist fellow travelers, racists, or over-the-top anti-communists like Joe McCarthy. Nixon's success was making this man's head explode.
Well, if that can happen to a learned, prosperous man in the early 1970s, what chance would your average Republican suburbanite have now?
As many have noted, the conservative worldview is black and white. It is absolute. It is top-down, because it's based on the medium of TV. It's hot, and it goes one way. So dissenters are always wrong. You're either with us or with the other – the hippies, the communists, the people in the cities, the terrorists. It's a comforting and self-contained world.
What happened to that world? It became obsolete. In the wake of Iraq, of Katrina, of the Plame Scandal and the Big Shitpile, the narrow edge the Nixon thesis had held for so long disappeared. Blinders came off a minority of the old majority, creating the opportunity to create a new majority on the other side.
But just as Bush was reduced to bluster as his lies were exposed, so his followers decided (with help from their surviving leaders) that the way back was with bigger lies. That global warming was a hoax. That the President was a foreigner. That the government could be drowned in a bathtub. That John Galt made sense. That anyone who disagreed with them had evil motives. Even that Nixon's original achievements and proposals were somehow unconstitutional.
Against changes that threaten their cul de sacs, rejection is the only proper stance. Just as with my liberal host 40 years ago. If the other side says the sky is blue, it's red. If they say the Sun rises in the east, it's the west. Up is down. Tell me anything. Just make it stop.
Here's the thing about change. It won't stop. It never does. You either adapt to change or you die. And in the end we all die, one way or another.
What is dieing today is the myth of white suburban America, the big cars and the big lots and the long commutes that protect us from the “criminal element” and the “other.” Why?
The answer isn't political, it's economic. Educated, creative minds are what we need. Most office jobs can be done better by computers. Most are being done by them. Those jobs aren't coming back.
The way forward lies with what Richard Florida calls our Creative Class, with minds trained to do what computers can't, who can invent new devices that harness the energy abundance all around us. People who can use the Internet intelligently, who read Make Magazine. Who see high gas prices as a challenge rather than a threat. Who find stuff like this funny.
Among the Creative Class, unemployment is near zero. Unemployment is concentrated among those who either have the obsolete skills of the last era or who have no skills at all. People who know you have to use computers to make change, not just replicate what computers already do, are the only people moving ahead.
This scares the shit out of people used to the top-down world of the TV era. The Internet isn't just a medium. It's where we live, where the answers are. It's our telephone, our library, where we work and where we play. Wide open, global, ready for anything, and constantly evolving.
Long after the Berlin Wall fell, two movies came out which I think speak to the mental state of today's crazy.
The Lives of Others was an honest appraisal of the past era, when people routinely spied on their neighbors, and the psychic cost of all that. But my favorite is Goodbye, Lenin!, a comedy in which an old woman is shielded from the reality of the Wall's fall by her well-meaning children.
The old world is not coming back. Those who can't accept that simply won't move into the future. They're the past. Reaganism needs to be buried with Marxism. The truth is just never that simple.
It's certainly enough to drive anyone crazy. But it's also profoundly sad. Watching it play out in our politics over the next years and decades should give you no pleasure.
It's just the price of progress.
NOTE: This was written a week before the President unleashed his long-form birth certificate on the nutters.
