If you survey right wing media outlets as I have done since the Gulf oil disaster began, you will notice a striking difference to similar outlets on the left. Mostly the coverage is blame and defend: "the environmentalist did it" or "Obama is incompetent, see? Government doesn't work".
What you won't find is any significant degree of outrage from the damage. Few are the photos of dead or dying animals, or any expressions of hurt or loss for the natural ecosystems affected. There are exceptions. But quite rare they are.
On the other hand, it is lefties expressing the most outrage. There were even candlelight vigils to mourn the disaster. Indeed, there is a great sense of loss among the left, as though something huge and important has died. This is a healthy response from a healthy, well adjusted population.
By contrast, all we get from the right is more attacks on their political opponents. And a bizarre defense of offshore drilling even as massive die-offs of fish wash ashore. This is the response of a sick and heartless population.
It would be easy to think that this lack of sympathy was just some sort of detachment from all things environmental. We all know how the right feels about treehuggers. But this would be a mistake. In fact, it is far more pathological.
If you think about it, it is apparent that the single organizing principle of conservatism is really selfishness. It's not a secret. They even write books about - like Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness" wherein she performs amazing feats of contortion to turn being a heartless sociopath into a good thing. You dress it up with lofty ideals about individualism versus the great collective, and pepper in some rubbish about the greatness of man's achievements in the absence of the oppressive social conscience. And you have all the rationalization a greedy, selfish asshole needs to think only of himself while others suffer.
Now, to be clear, I have written about this largely in absolutes. But people vary - some are slightly inclined with mild sociopathic tendencies. Others are candidates for incarceration - like the board of Goldman Sachs. And most fall somewhere in the middle.
But in essence, this is the vital distinction between the left and the right: the left concerns itself with what will benefit everyone, and the right concerns itself with what will benefit themselves, as individuals.
This is a fundamental distinction that has been largely overlooked by by liberal thinkers. It has not been overlooked by conservative thinkers. They have, for decades, along with an army of think tanks, PR firms, and marketing agencies, exploited our inherent potential for selfishness to manufacture the perfect consumer society.
There is a very specific vision of society where people are "consumers" who "act in their own self interests" and run around functioning like "happiness machines". Incredible resources, time and effort have been put into bringing this vision to reality.
From the big think tanks of the mid 20th Century, Rand, AEI and others, an idea was developed that the way to defeat liberalism, with all its bleeding hearted-ness, was to create a society of self interested individuals.
The big business conservatives behind this movement seized on papers published by the likes John Nash, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and of course Ayn Rand, that "demonstrated" with mathematical certainty that selfishness was good for society as a whole. And a movement was born.
But the real coup was getting supposed leftist leaders on the bandwagon. A new liberalism rose up around the ideas of conservative economists. And before long, and with a little campaign cash persuasion, lifelong liberal Democrats were singing the free market, individualism tune. Remember the era of "personal responsibility" and welfare reform?
But the New Liberals, i.e., neoliberals, weren't liberals at all. They were just old fashioned laissez-faire conservatives with a twist - they didn't care what you did in your bedroom.
The people had no idea what was going on. They didn't have the vocabulary to assess and evaluate the new language of the new liberalism (globalization, free markets, free trade, personal responsibility) just as they don't have the intellectual framework to assess the language of the sociopathic right (individualism, freedom, liberty). These all sound good to most people. And the ongoing media campaign to sell people on selfishness is really beginning to work - thus the rise of the sociopathic right and their champions like Rand Paul, Glenn Back etc. The popularity of these characters is the product of decades of work by right wing billionaires (e.g. the Koch brothers) who set about changing this country many years ago.
No one realized that we were slowly creating a nation of near sociopaths. Or that those with the strongest sociopathic tendencies would be the most likely to rise up in the new corporate system. But that is exactly what we are becoming. A sociopathic nation.
To be sure, much of the financial support of the libertarian astroturf movement comes from men who are only concerned with their profit. Are the Koch brothers ideological sociopaths or are they just plain old sociopaths motivated by greed. Who knows? But within that movement are true believers - people who have convinced themselves, or allowed themselves to be convinced, that caring about, feeling sympathy for, or concerning oneself in any way with their fellow man is not only unnecessary, but actually a bad thing. An almost religion based on live and let die.
The result of this new religion, the worship of greed and selfishness, is the imminent breakdown of American society. We are watching unravel every day. As it must. A society based on the social code of every-man-for-himself cannot survive. Nor would we want it to.