The Root of the Problem

A very good comment from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers, who I think has a good take on what's happening now:

A political and demographic re-alignment is happening before their eyes, and they are reaching back into their old bag of tricks of intimidation, violence, and apocalyptic fearmongering. You are British, Andrew. You love this country, and we love you for it. But you didn't grow up around these folks, and you don't realize what a permanent and potent part of the American political landscape they are.

They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

Read the whole thing. It's really very good. It goes a long way to explain the teabaggers, the health care reform "protests," the birthers, and a lot of other things that are finally crawling out from under their rocks.

Add in these observations by Bill Maher, and you can see why it's all becoming so obvious:

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive.

He's talking about people we all know -- some of them are even our relatives. (Yeah, I admit it. I don't see them much.) They are the people who get their "news" from Fox, Limbaugh, and O'Reilly, think that Ann Coulter is the philosophical genius of the conservative movement, and never go downtown. They live hermetically sealed lives because the universe -- read "reality" -- is a scary place.

They're afraid. They're afraid of everything. So they don't want to know about it, and they don't need to know aboiut it because they have opinions, you see. It doesn't matter that they're someone else's opinions, they believe them, and belief trumps truth.

I could investigate the causes of this attitude, but they're largely undocumentable, I suspect. My own prime suspect is a belief system that relies on received wisdom, condemns free enquiry, and holds dogma as superior to observable fact. And no, I'm not just targeting certain brands of Christianity or Islam -- you can find this attitude among Hindus, among animists, among atheists (well, the dogma part, any way), even among Pagans (which I consider scandalous, considering Paganism's deep connection to the natural world).

Keep in mind that most people are followers. Does that give you an insight?

Note: A further thought on that: the problem that I, and I think many people, are having with Obama right now is that he promised leadership -- and hasn't displayed any.