The Ideology of Through the Looking Glass

Maha has an absolute must-read post on the mythology of the tea baggers.

Michael Lind writes about mythological politics and the tea partiers, saying,

This is the key to understanding the otherwise inexplicable accusations by the populist right that Barack Obama is a socialist or fascist or whatever, as well as fantasies about a global secular humanist conspiracy. We are dealing with a mythological mentality, based on simple and powerful archetypes. Contemporary figures and current events are plugged into a framework that never changes. “King Charles (or King George) is threatening the rights of Englishmen” becomes “Barack Obama is promoting socialism” — or fascism, or monarchism, or daylight saving time.

As in other cases of mythological politics, like messianic Marxism, this kind of thinking is resistant to argument. If you disagree, then that simply proves that you are part of the conspiracy. Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers. It’s hard to come up with arguments that would persuade people who think that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are totalitarians to change their mind.

This is something I’ve written about in the past. It’s important to understand that the political “thinking” of the True Believers on the Right is a thick soup of myth, allegory, and archetype. Stuff like, you know, facts, are irrelevant to them.

She goes on, and it's scary as hell but well worth reading. It's a mentality that has never been far under the surface, not only in this country but in others, and the kind of thinking that leads people to do otherwise unthinkable things. I don't know that it's necessarily tied to Christianity as such -- we've seen the same sort of thing under communist regimes in China and the former Soviet Union, and can see it now in places like Uganda and Zimbabwe. Perhaps the correct observation is that those who think like this -- reliance on received wisdom, charismatic leaders, a strong us/them mentality, and the other phenomena Maha describes, are also those drawn to authoritarian, hierarchical systems, and, at the very least, distrustful of actual reality, or at least able to deny it in favor of what they believe, no matter how far-fetched.

At any rate, it's something to lose sleep over, that's for sure.