It's hard to explain the existence of Willful Cognitive Dissonance - tho' Slacktivist has certainly tried hard enough over the years - and how someone can manage to simultaneously believe and not believe that their mostly-churchgoing neighbors are all just waiting for the signal to come from the Kremlin (or the Mothership, perhaps, or just the Mouth of Hell) and seize them and throw them into concentration camps for the crime of being really Real True Christians (for a totally subjective value of the modifiers Real & True) and happily hand over their lives and their children's lives to the Godless Totalitarian Hippies in a brainwashed-cultists-of-Dystopia scenario.
Not actually knowing a whole lot about the logistics of the world helps, as does not actually knowing a heck of a lot about history and/or contemporary politics and how authoritarian and totalitarian regimes actually have come to power and what was really involved rather than highly-sentimentalized and overwrought stories of valiant Christian martyrs (so long as they were of the right denomination and sect, of course) nobly standing up to the Godless Enemies without any historical context whatsoever...
And hey, they may not be going to throw us to the actual lions today, but the mechanized medical horrors of twentieth-century totalitarianism ("tutelary dentistry" as Messrs. Vandemar & Croup would say) are just as evocative of that sort of pleasurable thrill of horror.
--If you're an adult who has chosen to enter this world and to reject all other counterbalancing info, however, it requires as Fred has said over and over again, a constant active maintenance of this contradiction - you have to work to ignore the cognitive dissonance between what you experience on a daily/hourly/yearly basis, and what you "know" to be the Real True Super Sekrit Truth behind it all: that dentists are all Soviet agents, that demons dictate lyrics to metalheads in their studios, that the Rachel Carson fans at the state university on the PBS special trying to keep all the peregrine falcons from going extinct are actually plotting to eradicate homo sapiens - but if you're a child raised in it, if this is what your parents and your parents' friends and the magazines your parents subscribe to all claim is how the world works, and you don't have any way to evaluate it, and you haven't yet been forced to admit that your parents may not be 100% accurate nor 100% honest 100% of the time, then you don't have to work at it...
...until you get out of the house even the teensiest bit and start having experience collisions with the world that mean that something or other is going to have to give, when the cognitive dissonance gets to be too much. It wasn't that the health care fearmongering and the natalist/dying white race fearmongering just like the War On Christmas BS didn't happen in the 1970s - it was just that we who believed it didn't have a good way then to broadcast our paranoia to the the world at large. So it stayed on the QT not because we wanted it to - there was at least one attempt to found a conservative Catholic broadcasting network before EWTN got off the ground - but because of the expense of printing and distribution back then, and of long distance phone calls and travel as well. Those were the ways those memes were spread, thirty some years ago.
And that was how I first heard about how the Dutch had gone full-metal Godwin and turned in to the very Nazis they had once fought against, and now if anyone was at all ill or elderly they were afraid to go to the doctor lest they be euthanized; and also how I heard about how the whole Organ Donor movement was just a scheme to get innocent people (believing Christians, of course) declared prematurely dead so that they could be martyred and vivisected; and how likewise the whole "brain death" thing was just a scam so that innocents could be sacrificed by the liberal humanity-haters.
Yes, we really (for an indefinite value of "really") believed this, and we had our own bloody shirt back then, too.
The Terry Schiavo of the 1970s was a young woman named Karen Ann Quinlan who tragically mixed drugs and alcohol while partying and stopped breathing for too long and never regained consciousness, although her body survived on and off of a ventilator for many years until finally even the best medical care of the day couldn't keep an inert and unmoving organism from failing to thrive. There were differences - her parents were the ones who were alternately demonized or painted as hapless pawns of the Ebol Liberals, by our alternative media back then, since they were the ones who had decided that it did their daughter no good to pretend that she would recover and petitioned for the right to take her off the machines.
The big thing among our little theocon groups was Faith In Miracles - to say that Quinlan would never wake up because people who have had the oxygen cut off to their brains for that long (barring rarely, circumstances of extraordinary cold) just don't wake up was to deny the truth of the Gospels and say that God couldn't regrow her brain cells, and thus Jesus couldn't have raised the daughter of Jairus and Lazarus and himself much less healed the blind and the lame and so we had to affirm that it was possible that the so-called "Brain Dead" were really just sleeping, pointing eagerly to stories of coma patients recovering without any knowledge - or care - for what specific sorts of head traumas they had received (to be fair, this was still the 1970s, and comprehensive brain imaging was still in the future; OTOH to be fair we ate up every story of a miraculous cure and hailed it as "proof" no matter how far-fetched or undocumented - I still recall pretty well the story of the Italian girl "born without pupils in her eyes" who supposedly miraculously gained her sight thanks to the intercession of Padre Pio; the explanation for why all these miracles were not admitted by the scientific world and studied was, of course, that the godless secular humanists suppressed the truth!) Of course God can regrow a dissolved brain, if He wants to - you just have to have the faith to give Him a chance!
So, anyways, Karen Ann Quinlan - a young white woman who could be depicted as a helpless sacrificial lamb (her scandalously-Seventies pills'n'booze mishap was always glossed over by the right wing media thus I had misremembered it as being a prescription mixup) was the poster child for the anti-euthanasia, anti-organ donation, anti-anti-"heroic measures" in the name of the "sanctity of life" crowd back in the Bicentennial Year. Long, long editorials were written in all of those magazines I mentioned yesterday, and more - Findarticles shows that the National Review was still talking* about how important the Quinlan case was as recently as 2003, frex - and the only reason we didn't protest was that there wasn't any good way to organize the kind of sideshows seen in 2005.
--The real culprits in the cases of Quinlan and Schiavo - the patriarchal societal forces that led them both to starve themselves into bulimia to conform to the requirement than women be "perfect" - were, of course, never mentioned by the "sanctity of life" sanctimonious, then or now; it was as irrelevant as who the real Karen and Terri had been, and what they actually said and did when they were still present on earth.
Meanwhile, the opponents of the NEA - National Education Association, that is, not the also-ebol-liberal National Endowment for the Arts, a mix-up of the enemies list that FOX made not too long ago - were going on and on in our zines about how the godless secular humanist/neopagan hippies in the schools were corrupting the youth of Athens with their moral relativism, telling their helpless children that it was perfectly okay to stick granny on an icefloe when she got too old and sick to take care of, because that was what the Eskimos did (the heathens!) and so you shouldn't be surprised if ickle Dick and Jane came home from grade school soon and wanted to kill off Gramps and Grandma because their teachers had told them to (and you're next! was the not so sub-text there) - there might even have been anecdotes to support it, too, right up there with all the talk of obscene rituals being introduced into our churches and the satanic backbeats of rock music.
You wonder why the Freepers were so willing to believe and claim that Obama must have gone to Hawai'i not to be present at his beloved grandmother's bedside for her final hours but to assassinate her in some arcane plot to further his political campaign, you really have to have been there in 1975, imbibing in the pure brew of rightwing propaganda from the cauldron of anti-Mimir...
This is why the whole Vince Foster thing worked so well on so many, too. If you were already primed to believe in this whole Shadow Society deal, the diabolical forces playing Puppetmasters with the whole world through their liberal minions, then the idea that a couple of then-obscure regional politicians could have masterminded the sort of cover-ups necessary to get away with serial-killing all their rivals and enemies for years is way easy to accept. Particularly if you keep telling yourself that you're part of an Enlightened Elite and everyone else is just stupid, so that they'd of course be easily taken in/brainwashed and oblivious to all the Supersekrit sinister plotting going on around them...
Who really was pulling the strings?
At the time, I had no idea that there was ever a plan to put a national healthcare system in place in this country - I was in grade school and got most of my history, as well as my news, filtered by our conservative ideologues, it wasn't until I was in 7th grade that I began getting access to contradictory first-hand historical sources and of course if you don't know what to look for you often don't even recognize its tracks - but it turns out there was, FDR's successor had attempted to put one in in 1945 and was blocked by the Republicans back then, too. Just like the constant drumbeat of anti-Union propaganda in the Wanderer and Register, we were being played by the Plutocracy.
I should add that the sorts of "entitlement" programs that conservatives here hate, like expanded public education and food stamps no less than welfare, were not put in place for altruistic reasons. You hear all kinds of puff about how wonderful American education was in the good old days - I've read, however, the frantic articles on yellowing newspaper pages about the even more frantic remedial reading programs that were being shoved through in spring of '42 when it was discovered that a vast percentage of draftees couldn't read well enough to follow procedures in basic training. A few people got a good education in the Thirties; most didn't. Same with WIC - the children of the Depression were so sickly from malnutrition and the effects of it so lasting that too many were failing their medical exams at the draft boards. And the wiser of the old plutocrats knew that the dole was the minimal price they paid to avoid being stood up against a wall like their counterparts in other countries.
Unfortunately, a lot of them didn't realize it even back then, and spent the time ever since fighting against even the minimal reforms and social safety nets put in place by FDR. Now their heirs carry that fight forward - but it wasn't like they stopped in between.
And it was never just about class. Never just about the money. I still haven't fully gotten over the thunderbolt penny that dropped when I read the original 1920s ur-screed of Henry Ford about the War on Christmas as posted on iirc Corrente - it was meme-for-meme identical to all the ones I'd read as a kid about how the evil liberals and the Godless Atheists were conspiring to take Christ out of Christmas...except that where we had "secular humanists" Ford had written, of course, "the Jews."
It was one of those "We totally got PWN3D moments" - here we were, all us sentimental patriotic Zionists (who didn't have any actual Jewish friends, natch, let alone skin in the game) believing ourselves passionately anti-anti-Semitic, dutifully barfing up the lies of one of the most notorious bigots in our history. (Ford's hatemongering, however whitewashed, actually made it into my HS social studies book.) It was like the time that I found out that the guy writing all the pro-DDT screeds in our conservative Catholic magazines was getting paid by the company that owns the patent on DDT - well, duh, follow the money! Though the links between the social levers and fiscal chutes in cases like How dare they make us acknowledge that not everyone here is a Christian?! and Women today aren't having enough babies! is less obvious, and again, not totally explicable by surface cost-benefit analysis.
Legerdemain, deflection, and, yes, justification of simple bigotry and privilege fearful of its stability all factor in to it, just as in the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act and legal segregation and gender-divided suffrage.
So we got played, bigtime - just like we got played in the matter of "we're saying that 'Women are violating their own maternal natures, the selfish beasts' because we can't quite come right out and say "OMG! the swarthy furriners are outbreeding us!" these days, although we can juxtapose this with an article about how the Japanese (those godless heathens) are all going to go extinct because they have so many abortions, and won't have anyone to work in their factories in the future, and look at Germany and the Turks, and..."
Oh, it was all there, between the lines - if you knew what you were looking for, if you knew what frequencies those particular dog-whistles were tuned to. The ads for Fr. Coughlin tapes and the ads for the John Birch Society newsletter on the pages of the Wanderer and Register and Triumph and Remnant of Israel, the fact that if you were old enough to have heard the original screeds of Ford and co you wouldn't be fooled by the scraping-off of the serial numbers and painting in of new ones. The old guard, which had been part of that subculture back in the day, sure wasn't. But that would have required that I be a lot older than eight years, or to have grown up in a family aware of the real patterns of US politics instead of various romantic delusions and counter-delusions, and who weren't outsiders taking up with the reactionaries in a romantic quest for mystical, mythical "Authenticity" themselves.
Next, I'll attempt to try to haul this all together with the ironies of the brutality - the very real deaths and sufferings that occur in our "compassionate conservativism" system, and have occurred all along, compared and contrasted with the hyped horrors of the Soylent Green/Logan's Run scaremongering, and how it is very strange to see this being hauled out again now but as the "ZOMG! We could have it as bad as Canada! We could end up like Britain or France!" whistle is breaking under the counter-volley of reality from abroad, for the first time since they started this particular line of attack in as I recall the early 80s, I suppose there's not much left to do but go back to the older tools in the kit.
But I'll close by saying that sick people don't make good soldiers either, something the War Party ought to remember since it has proven as true in the 21st century as it did sixty-seven years ago (and before that, again and again through the centuries, though the self-proclaimed guardians of Western Culture can't be bothered to follow Santayana's law...)
* This is also a good example of how supremely out of touch with RL US culture and society the Hegemony flacks were, and remain (just like saying "see, poor people aren't really poor, they have CELL PHONES!) : I honestly don't know how much people in the wider American spheres were aware of the Quinlan case at the time, or cared, since I was never let out of our bubble in the Seventies - but what I do know is that I had to precede any discussion of how no, this wasn't new, we had all this same sort of thing in the Seventies with an explanation of who Karen Ann Quinlan was, I couldn't simply invoke her case as nobody remembered what I was referring to even on political blogs. It's why the hubristic Culture 11 died on the vine, too.