Half of all people are of below-average intelligence - this is true by definition. Go somewhere that people of all demographics congregate randomly, and about half of those you see will have double-digit IQs. This is just fine, of course: IQ is deliberately calculated to produce a normal distribution, so that 100 is exactly at the height of the bell curve. Unfortunately, the same truism more or less works for things like morality, empathy, and accountability, however difficult they are to quantify - about half of people will necessarily fall short of the most typical condition. I've understood this intuitively for many years, so the existence (and persistence) of the Republican Party has never shocked me the way it does some of the more innocent souls on the left. Its crimes and routine outrages are not an aberration, but nor do I subscribe to the kind of cowardly rationalizing that excuses the folks whose actions empower them. To one degree or another, Republicans and Republican voters are just bad people.
To advance politically in a real human civilization, we must ultimately come to terms with the fact that half of all people are simply bad human beings on the level where group decision-making occurs. We must understand and accept that the love a Republican shows to their families and friends doesn't necessarily bear on how they would treat a stranger whose eyes they will never have to see: Different parts of the brain are dominant in such an abstract decision, so a higher level of empathy and responsibility is needed just to do what would be considered common decency if they were actually in the other person's presence. Their "inner lights" are dim, and do not extend to people whom they do not know personally or as members of an exalted ingroup. Everyone else is regarded as irrelevant at best, if not a threat that must be sternly controlled and kept in its place.
Malice, Narcissism, and Fear are the interlocking trinity that animates the Republican "soul" at whatever point it diverges from its humanity, and the distance between that point and their individual interest has rapidly contracted over the years. Back in the days of Barry Goldwater, the Republican abandoned his humanity and moral reason at the water's edge, but for the most part were at least somewhat accommodating to the interests of average Americans. They saw themselves as contributing parts of an actual country, however warped and perverse their ideas for that country had already become, and the level of hate and psychotic ideation now routinely directed against their own countrymen was largely reserved for foreign policy.
Once their malice had breached the water's edge, it was no longer any particular foreign country that was the Hated Enemy, but the federal government of our own United States - both the political and social fabric that unifies us as a single people with common values and interests, because those values and interests both condemned them. They were used by the power elite, but the objectification was more than willing on their part - they gladly slurped up racial bigotry, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and religious fanaticism as the pedagogy of their world, and rewarded its practitioners with whatever ends were hidden behind the means. Taxes should be lower, because dirty minorities benefit from public spending, so who do you care more about - some black welfare queen's crack baby, or your own blonde, pig-tailed daughter?
Even folks who would never actually say such things nevertheless believed it, because they're just bad people. The idea that every red cent that ever comes into their possession is rightly and uniquely theirs, with no inherent obligation to any other human being - let alone to those who look substantially different from themselves - appealed to their Narcissism. The idea that these Others were victimizing them, regardless of all reason and evidence to the contrary, appealed to their Malice, because every single shred of unsatisfied greed, disappointed desire, and humiliated ego could be dumped on the hated scapegoat who would be powerless to defend itself against the Big Lie. The other half of the people (for lack of a better word, the "good" people) were either immune to the lie or repulsed by it on its face, but they were not similarly energized.
For decades, this was the single-minded focus of the Republican Party and its ideological cadres in talk radio and the corporate sector: Annihilate American identity and values, and remove all vestiges of the social connective tissue that unites us as a people. Where (and only where) the individual may be prone to greed, selfishishness, and bigotry, they would insist on "rugged individualism," and refuse even common-sense compromises with the necessities of the common welfare that benefit all of society: Laws establishing financial safety nets, support services, punishing discrimination, and regulating of business could not be tolerated, because "the individual" (i.e., the wealthy individual) must be "free" to do as the Republican Party wishes them to do, regardless of the national interest and the positive rights of those whom the laws were enacted to protect.
But where the individual, the city, or the state was prone to act liberally, in those cases the Republican Party preached strict adherence to "community values" - i.e., imposing the right-wing trinity of Malice, Narcissism, and Fear from above. If the individual was acting too liberally, then they must be stopped by the city, county, state, or federal government. If cities or counties were passing ordinances that were too liberal, then the county, state, or federal government must overrule them, punish those who had impudently pursued liberal policies, and see it to that they lacked the power to do so again. And if states were doing so, then obviously the power of the federal government must be invoked in that case to ensure that the right of Conservatives to rule was not being infringed.
Malice, Narcissism, and Fear were creeping into the cracks of the foundation with the enthusiastic help of the right-wing elite who were tired of their pretense of being Americans. Malice in the form of draconian, punitive sentences for minor or victimless crimes coupled with virtual impunity for white collar criminals; third-world prison and public school conditions, often with both institutions resembling each other in how they treated their wards; obliteration of all public services that primarily serve lower incomes and minorities; and oppressive social conservative laws enforced with ruthless determination to crush the spirit of nonconformity. Narcissism in the promulgation of mindless nationalist, racist, and religious pedagogy through both public and private sources, attacks on immigrants, and promotion of bigotry through dog-whistle politics. And Fear through growing control of media that would cater increasingly to the neurotic anxieties of white, upper-class conservatives while ignoring or even actively suppressing knowledge of the real problems of society.
Now it has gone beyond even that, and the states themselves are under attack - everything that made them what they were is being undermined, their resources auctioned off, and even their powers usurped into the hands of private dictators or people elected purely at the behest of the oligarchic private state. Conservatives are no longer even pretending loyalty to their states and communities - they are not only unabashedly in "every man for himself" mode, but have increasingly interpreted that doctrine as requiring unlimited malice toward all human beings beyond their immediate personal sphere. Politically speaking, the world in their heads is already in the form their actions are pushing to make it in reality: One where they are crouched in the turret of a private castle with their family, picking off trespassers with a machine gun and shouting "Yeeeeee-haw!"
Many Republicans have degenerated even beneath the level of caring for their own families, and have reached the nirvana of right-wing psychopathy: Total malice toward all living things that are not them. Their spouses and children are mere ornaments to be kept in line or bought off as necessary, their parents a discarded necessity that have outlived their usefulness, and their friends merely allies to be defended or betrayed as they deem it convenient. But rather than looking on these depraved, crippled creatures with the horror and pity that befits them, other conservatives look on them with admiration, as paragons of strength and virtue who are leading the way to a glorious conservative future. Because, simply speaking, they're just bad people.
No elaborate sociopolitical modeling beyond that is necessary - they're just bad people. They will probably always be bad people. With few exceptions, they will not spontaneously grow the ability to see other human beings as human beings; will not come to see strangers as people with the same needs and hopes whom they simply don't know; will not come to understand that they are not worth more than other people, and especially not because of how much money they have. They will continue to be hypocrites whenever and wherever they can get away with it, and sometimes even when they can't - however enjoyable we find their comeuppance in those cases. Their beliefs will continue to be insane, irrational, and inconsistent, and their actions on the political level will continue to be colossally immoral and ludicrous.
The fact is, deception of an honest person is always temporary - eventually the truth reaches a person who looks on the world with open eyes, and they have no reason to maintain a lie beyond a certain point. Even the deluded, if there is a single scrap of regard for the truth in their hearts, eventually come around and accept what they see before them even if it's painful. Only true liars - people whose very center is corrupt - can be deceived in perpetuity, because they serve idiotic impulses for which reality is merely another tool to be used or discarded as convenience dictates. They cannot see beyond the crude internal mechanism of their emotions to what an honest and clear-minded person recognizes as the simple truth.
While they may abstractly recognize a distinction between True and Not True, they have a denuded concept of the distinction: If you say it is "a quarter past three" when it is actually 3:12 PM, you probably see the divergence as insignificant. This is how a conservative sees outright lies that serve their purpose - the fact that what they say isn't even in the same cosmos as the truth simply does not enter what they consider the domain of relevance. The test of relevance, and thereby of truth, is how closely a statement adheres to their narcissistic view of themselves and their ingroups, malicious view of others, and intense fear of all thoughts and social conditions which deviate from this simple power calculus.
Everything which shows a true reflection of who they are, they interpret as practically an attack on them because it is inevitably far short of how they estimate themselves. Every fact which might even slightly moderate their malicious view of others, they will tend to regard as unfairly apologetic of those others - which is unacceptable because it reduces the degree of their own superiority. And anything which reduces or compromises their state of fear, they will regard with sullen resentment because fear is the source of their motivation, the North Star of their morality, and the gravity which holds their world together. Without it, they feel lost and threatened with dissolution into a blind world they do not understand and lack the vital energy to learn about.
All that we can change is the degree to which the guiding elements of right-wing politics are able to harness the mild corruption, petty brutality, and infantile selfishness of the typical conservative mind as tools of Wagnerian destructiveness. It is those elements which guide the schizoid dissonance of right-wing thinking into a tool of interference in meaningful communication; who create bubbles of absolute certainty around beliefs that are utterly psychotic and illogical; and who reduce all relationships to a simple, zero-sum question of power with no room for such delicate concepts as mutual rights or cooperation for the common good. To them, all actions resolve down to one person putting a bullet in another person's head, so they are determined to be the ones pulling the trigger: They make no concessions, ever, on any subject, and their diseased followers count them strong for it.
And this has never really shocked me. What does shock and disturb me, however, is the degree to which these perversions are able to dictate the actions of the other half of society by osmosis. If they use the word "liberal" as an insult, somehow this obligates us to react to their psychotic depravity as if it meant something - react either by using the word defensively, writing apologetic essays explaining it, or run away from the attack with unnecessary distinctions (e.g., "progressive"). I've never said "I'm proud to be a liberal," because it's too fundamental a premise of morality to brag about: Do you go around saying you are proud to be a sane, competent adult? These are some basic conditions of being considered a healthy and productive person, not achievements. If you're not liberal - at least in practice (even if you subscribe to another term for arbitrary reasons) - then you aren't even part of American politics: You're just one of the many problems faced by American politics.
Anyway, getting back to the point, the absurd tendency of liberals to submit their words and ideas to the approval of what are basically moral and intellectual cripples is something that we definitely can address. Firstly, it needs to be stated categorically that the right-wing in this country - indeed, in every country - consists of the type of person who in Germany in the 1930s responded enthusiastically to the rise of Nazism, and supported it either through direct membership or by assisting it in ways that went beyond the necessities of survival under its rule.
Conservatives definitely know this about themselves, at least as a subconscious irritation, and it makes them especially prone to throw out the comparison against others in ways that constitute doublethink (e.g., equating a liberal leader with Hitler). They use it so promiscuously and ridiculously that they make others reticent to use such analogies even where clearly appropriate, because the public space will have become saturated with such abusive, nonsensical versions that people wish to quarantine that entire era of history from public awareness.
So, I find it disturbing how easily they are able to control otherwise thoughtful people through mindless demonology. Conservatives are the same people who filled the ranks of the Nazi Party - the exact same. And the folks who populate so-called "Tea Parties" would have been the brownshirts burning down synagogues and engaging in street battles with Communists - in fact, at least the second part is how they already see themselves, and openly express disappointment and frustration that they are prevented from violent confrontation by the knowledge that they might actually be held accountable for it.
But regardless of how far out on the fringe the teabaggers are relative to the typical Republican voter, an identical distance existed between the brownshirts and the tidy parlors of the typical German supporter of the Nazi Party. You might hear a "tsk tsk" and gentle chiding, but all in all they consider it merely a consequence of good, healthy patriotism expressed inappropriately by inexperienced or naive people. Needless to say, that is not how the targets of brownshirt or teabagger rallies have tended to interpret them, nor the victims of violence inspired by them.
The German people who actively supported Nazism were not blameless victims of their environment, nor were they legions of Satan-worshipping caricatures in black leather trenchcoats licking their chops at the prospect of murdering millions: They were mostly people with normal family lives, ordinary personalities, and healthy personal relationships who fell on the wrong side of the morality bell curve, and felt that total warfare and demonization of a minority were legitimate means to affect order and restore their national "glory." Though blood flowed in the streets before their eyes, they clung to their fantasies because the lives of others were worth less to them than an illusory power borrowed at the expense of their country's total annihilation. These were people with Jewish neighbors who had known them all their lives, but accepted seeing them dragged off into the night without a word.
Do you think the conservatives you know are different? Surely they are more human than Germans, because they associate with...you...a being whose light shines so brightly that, were history to repeat itself, your right-wing neighbors and extended family members would be fighting at your side rather than telling the "removal squad" exactly where to find you. Except, that's not how it happens. Not ever. There was no Southern white uprising against the KKK, even in the mid-20th century when its full savagery and evil was on full display - at most it simply lost active support because it was deemed a disruption rather than a guardian of social order, much as the Nazi Party did once average Germans recognized it was in kamikaze mode. Why did Southern whites do nothing to stop the KKK? For the same reason as Germans vis a vis Nazism - they were raised to be human garbage who only cared for their own, and regarded Others as an irrelevant abstraction if not a threat.
So don't ever kid yourselves that there is something fundamentally different or better about "American" conservatives. Jared Lee Loughner was not an aberration - he's a prototype. Whether the growing violence of the right is an unintended byproduct of its politics or a conscious escalation, the critical facts remain the same - it is a feedback loop whose endpoint is predictable and numbingly familiar to historians. Those who guide the political right in America don't care what their tools believe, be it the supply-side orthodoxy fed to them by the Republican "mainstream" or the violent ravings of the most incoherent radio talk show host on the planet, so long as their actions harm the people standing in their way.
Maybe you have neighbors and perhaps friends who are Republicans, and if things really got nuts, you're sure you could count on them. They wouldn't be a part of it, would they? When push comes to shove, if it came down to letting some thugs with guns drag you off to an unknown fate on behalf of their politics, because you are part of a phenomenon they feel must be removed, surely their humanity would rouse from its slumber and they would choose to protect you because they know or are acquainted with you. Well, guess what - they probably would not. That is the lesson of history, and all your moral arguments or appeals to personal loyalty would sway them about as much as they historically have in such cases - i.e., not.
All your appeals to the Constitution would not rouse armed squads of "Libertarians" to your defense, because they would be too busy celebrating the murders as some kind of "liberation" from the "tyranny" of librulism. Those few who would still grudgingly acknowledge your right to exist once they were no longer under any social pressure to do so would still overwhelmingly do nothing to help you, because from their perspective you're to blame for "provoking" their nutty brethren, and you geeit whatever's a-comin' t'ya!! Of course, they would be mighty pissed when their own turn came and discovered just how hard it is to defend yourself with no country having your back, but their compeuppance would be little condolence to the dead.
To be perfectly frank, it doesn't matter what you think you know about a Republican - you could be their child's godfather or godmother, for all it matters. If their politics ceased to be an abstraction and came to your doorstep, the overwhelming evidence of history, both American and global, is that they would do nothing at all to help you, or would even participate in the crime. This is what you need to know about these people if you care about them at all - you cannot rely on them, and must not assume that they are part of the social or political support structure that would resist radicalization. Because, unless the ones you know are very rare indeed, their humanity has nothing to do with their politics, and if the situation escalated to the point where they had to choose - an escalation they would meanwhile have been full-throatedly supporting - they would definitely not put themselves in any danger on your behalf, even if they wished you had not become involved.
Now, in dealing with them, it is nonetheless critical to pretend that these people are Americans, because the presumption of mutual connection is still worth something even if it would be little obstacle to the destruction they would enable. They're not actually Americans in any active sense - they are social flotsam, superficially imbued with the symbols and rhetoric of a country whose nature is utterly beyond their comprehension. The minute that nature differs with the agenda that motivates them as conservatives, they deviate into crassly un-American attitudes and behaviors with essentially no consciousness that they'd ever done so: As far as they can tell, they're still being "American" simply because they wave flags and use the word "freedom" like some kind of verbal garnishment. And nothing you say is going to educate them on the matter, because once again it's not about truth for them: They wouldn't associate themselves with the Republican Party if it were.
But in their presence, and in statements that communicate with them, you must never release them from their mutual obligations as Americans. They would never sacrifice their own convenience for their country, but never make it free for them - always hold them to the price of their rhetoric, no matter how plainly they have made a lie of their being American. This was what Abraham Lincoln recognized both in his inclusive inauguration speech and in the decision allowing most Confederates to become American citizens again without recrimination. They may have renounced their allegiance, but Lincoln recognized that it was crucial for the United States never to accept their renunciation - to hold their allegiance as owed and their "true" identity as Americans. Call it an act of deliberate denial, but the result has probably been far more beneficial for this country than had we either gone our separate ways or treated the South as a recalcitrant foreign conquest.
However, even in the midst of "purposeful denial," reality was addressed: President Lincoln had planned an ambitious Reconstruction program that included radical civil rights laws and full political empowerment of freed slaves in the South backed with military force. It would have been very fascinating to see what would have come of those programs had he not been assassinated, but alas the conservative character of the South asserted itself, as it tends to do, through a bullet to the head of a hero. It wasn't until the 1950s and '60s that we as a nation once again said to that part of the country, "You will respect the basic values and laws of this nation," and sent National Guardsmen to enforce Supreme Court orders integrating schools. And the black civil rights activists of the South were mainly to credit for that happening, because they had risen to the highest standards of what it means to be American, and taught their country something new about freedom.
That could not have happened if we had accepted the Confederate resignation from our country, even in moral terms: We rejected it completely, and said to them, "Not only are you not a separate nation, but we refuse to even say that you are a separate people. You are us, and we are you. Our destinies are entwined, and we will bring America to the South even if it is not yet in its heart." From that simple 19th century foresight, ultimately, would grow the 20th century civil rights movement that would transform both the United States and the world in ways that have still not entirely unfolded. And so must be your attitude toward Republicans.
They are bad people. They are not Americans, if the word "American" has any deeper significance than a word on a piece of paper. They might not pull the trigger, but in all probability they would watch your entire family dragged off into the night by thugs whose politics they identify with and not say a word. But even in full knowledge of these facts, you must save them. You must call them "My countryman," and never release them from their obligations. They may never pay it; they may renounce it completely; they may say they want nothing to do with you or the reality of this country; but you must never stop accounting for what they owe, because the debt is real and they cannot escape it unless they are absolved it by those they owe. Never delude yourself that your help will ever be deserved or reciprocated, only recognize that you will either save them or they will destroy you. If they cannot carve lines in your heart where your country lives, they cannot touch it.