Teabagger-style conservatism should be classified as a mental disorder.
I know, I know. It sounds so pejorative, but bear with me. I have some actual evidence for this position.
In reading through Zacapoet's excellent "My conversation w/ a Republican Bank President" (currently on the rec list), and CartoonPoet's "The Tea Party is an Anti-Liberal Movement", and their comment threads this morning, a couple of recent diaries, an article on Alternet, and a stunning realization coalesced in my mind, and I need to share it with you. Over the fleur-de-Kos, if you would....
First point, as pointed out by Quackerz in this comment: If you take a map of the Confederacy, and then look at a map of the states where Teabaggers won elections, there's a startling resemblance. No, it's not a one-to-one correlation, but out of the eleven former Confederate states, six of them have a moderate to strong Tea Party presence in our current House and Senate. That's a majority of former Confederate states that are now Tea Party states.
Second point, as pointed out by SueDe in this comment, the Republicans have always been the party of the rich, but the rich have shifted from the Northeastern rich, who were characterized by a Puritan noblesse oblige view of the poor and disadvantaged, to the Southern/Confederate rich, who are characterized by an "I got mine, Jack" attitude reminiscent of the Southern slaveowners. This insight is expanded upon in greater detail in Sara Robinson's excellent article on Alternet, "Conservative Southern Values: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come To Rule America," which I strongly recommend you read.
But here's the kicker, and here's what I think makes teabaggerism qualify as a mental disorder needing treatment. Several Kossacks observed in comments that the entire Teabagger mentality is about being against things - most generally, liberals and liberal thought. It's a very old tribal "my team over all!" mentality, and as we've all seen and despaired of, it makes them vote against their own interests time and again.
The specific comment here is a gilias girl's observation that being opposed to something gives Teabaggers a sense of empowerment:
taking a sense of empowerment at being opposed to something; fundamentally different from most other political movements that are about supporting and/or building something.
And that's when it clicked for me.
We have a party of people who are rich, or who aspire to be rich, and feel that anyone who's not is less than (team/tribal mentality). We have a party of people whose entire culture is rooted in controlling other people (slaveowner mentality). And that gives us a subculture, the Tea Party, that is absolutely centered on their team winning and controlling by any means necessary, at whatever cost.
Controlling, no matter what the cost.
This is the same as an anorexic's mentality.
Anorexia is the consistent refusal of food and an obsession with not eating. Almost every anorexic ever interviewed has serious control issues. They have so many stressors in their lives that they can't control that they soon center on food as the one thing they can control. They may not be able to be beautiful, or do well in school/at work, or make other people like them, but they're going to control every calorie that passes their lips, and make that number as small as possible. Most anorexics report a sense of empowerment and exhilaration the first time they refuse to eat. Finally, something they can actually control! And that leads them to avoid food again, and again, and again.
It's classified as a mental disorder because a) there are always going to be things we can't control, and becoming a control freak about the few things we can is not considered a mentally healthy way to cope with that problem, and b) the thing that the anorexic chooses to control is actually causing them both short- and long-term harm.
And anorexia is just one example of a mental disorder centered on control issues. Cutters are the same way. So are bulimics. So are teabaggers. How many of us have seen, or heard about, a bagger wearing a T-shirt or displaying a bumper sticker that says "If a liberal thought of it, I'm against it"?
Folks, the Teabagger faction of the GOP today is suffering from political anorexia. They reject anything that might help them so they can maintain the illusion of control, because that is literally all they can see. Their team wins? They're in control. They reject liberal programs because they're liberal? Never mind that it hurts them; they're in control. The teabagger mindset is all about being the one in control, which means winning at any cost, even if the cost is to themselves more than to others.
It's a delusional state of mind. I don't think we can help them, but we need to understand the enemy, and this is the enemy. They are mentally unstable. Any competent psychiatrist should see it.