Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Post-Rational Politics

We can point out the contradictions all we want but it seams the idea of political persuasion based on reason or democratic principles simply does not work with the present Republican core.
  • Tea partyers welcome their individual state benefits and the disproportionate benefits to their red states.
  • Promilitary flag wavers don't seem perturbed that record-setting business profits don't trasnlate into jobs for vets.
  • Pro US patriots who erode civic life.
  • Pro religion advocates who mean one religion only.
  • Support for rights of unborn embryos and legal corporations but not of living women or others. 
  • Believe in Christian redemption but not in redemption of some crimes, or redemption of sinners who are not white or not republican.
But facts, consistency of principle, logic, or reality do not matter.

Whatever our analytical critiques of Enlightement, reason, the truth, I just don't feel prepared to deal with conservative politics now. I lack the tools to fathom a political struggle so devoid of a relationship to what we could consider truth, reality, or reason. I don't understand the Republican core's relationship to language.

We can say they are deluded. Yet even their relationship to fantasy baffles me, since their fantasies  are so harsh and mean. But to them this harshness is feel-good.

What is the logic of this political form? There is consistency: what does it add up to?

Certainly, it is anti-black: against having a black president, against social support for black populations, against redemption of black people who have committed crimes, against a commons that includes black people as equals who are not successful pizza moguls.

It's not all about race, though. The off the rails focus on abortion and reproduction, which  means men staking out the authority to adjudicate between the rights of living female people and those of embryos.
The anti-gay stance.

It is about the assertion of one vision of shared America, the manifest destiny and divine national favoratism, and the authority vested in those who maybe resemble the elite settlers of this part of the new world. Commons, redistribution are fine if they flow to this group.

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