We didn't come this far because we're made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.
And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves. So it goes with most great nation-states, which--feeling guilty about their savage pasts--eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy. Paul Harvey, 5/23/05 Commentary
Yes. That Paul Harvey. His honesty is refreshing. It shows the American wolf without its sheep's clothing. It's something that the predators on the American right wing are usually too savvy to display so openly. I was reminded of this quote when I was watching Pat Buchanan's interview on "The Daily Show" the other night. Buchanan was there to discuss his book about how the Mexicans, through a process of reverse Manifest Destiny, are getting back what they believe should never have been taken from them. As the Americans in the early 19th Century just moved in and eventually told the Mexican locals that this land was no longer theirs, so now the Mexicans are in the process of returning the favor in the American southwest.
It was interesting that toward the end of the interview, Buchanan, in I guess what he thought was a joke, talked about the liberal immigration policy of the American Indian, with the implication that America's fate vis a vis the Mexicans will be the same as that of the Indians vis a vis the Americans. And then it struck me that the key to understanding the sickness at the heart of the right-wing soul is a form of repressed guilt that has curdled into paranoia.
Right wingers believe that others will behave as badly toward them as they have behaved. Isn't that really the subtext of the Harvey quote? For people like Harvey and Buchanan the difference between sugar-coated, over-civilized Liberals and right-wing Conservatives is that the Liberals feel remorse and allow the guilt to get the better of them. Conservatives understand that the real world is eat or be eaten, and that we have to get our hands dirty, but we do it to survive. In other words, right-wing conservative thought is soaked through with hormones screaming fight or flight, with right-wingers being the fighters and the Liberals being the flighters, appeasers who can't be trusted to defend the homeland. The right winger sees admission of guilt as a weakness, as a dog offering its throat--something for candy asses, something effeminate.
It's important to understand that when you are in a survival mode, survival is the only goal, and all moral restraints are suspended. Morality is for the comfortable. Every atrocity is justified if it means we survive, if we get to eat another day. The Conservatives of which I speak, though, are not really the manly men they present themselves to be. They are like nervous squirrels. They have anxious eyes darting hither and thither looking at everyone as a potential predator waiting for its chance to pounce and bite.
Such Conservatives believe that Liberals don't understand the real world--that they are sissies, which is at the heart Rove's branding strategy for the Democrats. It's why it was so important that the GOP swiftboat Kerry, McCain, and Murtha, all political opponents with strong military resumes that subvert the effeminate typology. The key to GOP appeal is their self-branding as the tough guys who will do the dirty work that the pansy, faint-at-the-sight-of blood Democrats don't have the stomach for. We live in an ugly world where everybody hates us and is out to get us. You need a big Daddy to keep you safe.
The curious thing about paranoia is that it becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Paranoids, in assuming that people are out
to get them, act in aggressive ways to preempt the attack they "know" is
coming and in doing so provoke others to fight back. The paranoid then
sees the defensive response of the enemy as proof of his aggressive intentions. It's a perfect system. It's their very paranoia that creates the conditions that reinforce their paranoia.
We saw it shaping our relationship with the Soviets during the Cold War. How many people remember, for instance, that the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba during the Kennedy administration was in response to our placing missiles in Turkey? Most Americans saw it then and remember it now as a blatant act of aggression by the evil, godless communists; the Soviets saw it as redressing a strategic power imbalance. How many Americans remember that the Russians backed down from Cuba when we backed down from Turkey? Kennedy had to fight the right-wingers who pushed for a military confrontation, for what Bush these days is calling a "defining moment". Saner minds, thanks be to God, prevailed in that crisis. Do you think that the mindset of the current administration has even the remotest capablilty to negotiate sanely with Iran? Prove me wrong, but I don't see it.
The right-winger lives in a mental world in which it is either eat or be eaten, in which the strong dominate the weak, and so we better stay strong because our candy asses are gonna get ate by the hungry wetbacks or ragheads or gooks. The idea of the the rule of law or negotiating for mutual self-interest is for girly, naive chumps. And so he justifies his aggression as always motivated by the need to defend himself. He attacks first because he knows that the enemy is capable of acting just as badly as he is capable of, and he proves it by acting badly. If we Americans act badly, does it not follow that non-Americans will act even worse? A no brainer for the right-wing brain.
Right wingers believe that we live in a dangerous world in which everybody is either weak and beneath our respect or if strong out to get us. Why? Because we stand for everything that is good and true and our enemies hate everything that is good and true. It is impossible for them to grasp the idea that the hatred their enemies feel toward them is directly proportional to their bad behavior toward them, behavior they justified in the paranoid belief that they had to defend themselves from their evil intentions.
What's really rather remarkable to me as I read around the net, especially in the blogs oF conservatives or those who are leaning that way is the ignorance or blindness to our bad behavior in the past. They look at everything in a historical vacuum. As badly as deep down they know we have acted, our actions are nevertheless always above reproach, and the actions of others are always by definition worse. These others hate us for no reason; it's just this abstract, ungrounded hatred, an effect without a cause. People who point out that American bad behavior is a significant cause for the effect are looked upon as un-patriotic or as America bashers.
I look at myself as someone who demands that America live up to its highest ideals. And that starts with our refusal to give in to our basest instincts and fears. The right-wingers see themselves as tough and brave. I see them as small and scared. I see them as having to compensate for their sense of weakness and inadequacy by building up this excessively powerful military for which there seems to be no limit. For them there is no limit to the evil intentions of those who would do us harm, so how can we put a limit on the means we need to protect ourself? I see the most powerful antidote to the hatred people feel toward us to be in the adoption of a confident, magnanimous, prudent approach to the world. An approach that models and interior strength and easy confidence that every sane human being longs for and seeks to emulate. Instead we're slowly becoming a fear-obsessed nightmare everyone will want to escape.
There is no sanity or proportionality or prudence in the right-wing imagination of the dangers we face. They are frightened, little people who have no real confidence in what truly has made America great. People like Buchanan and Harvey have no confidence that Mexicans want to be Americans more than they want to be Mexicans. They have no confidence that these Mexicans would resist the idea of a tin-pot banana republic annexing the southwest just as strongly as their Anglo fellow citizens because that's what they fled, and that's why they came here in the first place.
But then again if America stays the course with the kind of people we have in power now, it probably won't make any practical difference who rules in the southwest. What the right wingers are doing in their paranoia is turning this country exactly into a place that will be no different from all the places they fear want to do us harm.