Modern conservatism barely bothers to disguise its contempt for the average man. The lethal cruelty of the Republican anti-healthcare bills were just the latest examples. This conservative candor has been made possible by a medical development: an hallucinatory anesthetic with which they dope-up their base. The drug is called “rugged individualism,” and conservatives now are giving it out in doses mixed with steroids: a.k.a. the “Cajun Navy.”
Herbert Hoover introduced the rugged individual in 1928 and soon found it more useful than he could have imagined. Never mind the stock-market crash. Never mind those worldwide, banking crises. Never mind the drought that stirred up a Dust Bowl from prairies cleared of their grasses. Just rugged up and you’ll be fine.
Self-reliance always has been an American value, but conservatives have turned it into a weapon of mass deprivation. Rugged individualism is an excuse to keep government from improving the lives of its people. It is a pretense for imposing what Franklin Roosevelt called “a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
The Great Depression hammered some sense into the American electorate, but that sense resides in short-term memory. So, conservatives openly advocated an anti-health-care bill that was conspicuous for its brutality. They openly pursued a law that would have inflicted harm and suffering on tens of millions of Americans and death on many. They proudly displayed the most inhumane impulses of conservatism. And they almost won.
They almost won because their base knows that the real problem is not healthcare or anything else; it is that Americans are not sufficiently rugged. Vote Republican!
Presented correctly, the Republican base eats that up. It is their hedge against cognitive dissonance. It’s not easy to pretend that you are a modern-day mountain man, but the Republican Party has your back.
It turns out that ruggedness is measured differently for different people, especially different color people. It’s those “others” who are un-rugged. They are the takers. The Republican base is different. It has a right to revel in its ruggedness and to feel superior despite much of it accepting some form of government assistance, just like, say, Paul Ryan.
The imagery of the Cajun Navy was made for this scam. One look and you can see that it’s rugged individuals upon whom we should learn to rely. Ignore the billions that all those self-reliant Texas conservatives will demand. Ignore what would happen had they really to rely on rugged individualism. Expect the Cajun Navy or some dry-dock equivalent to be a conservative staple from this point forward.
As silly as that sounds, though, it is a mistake for Democrats not to fight this scam. It works too well. We must call it out. Call rugged individualism what it is: a scam, a lie, a fraud, a cheat, a swindle, and a racket. Say that it uses hate and resentment to distract us from corporate corruption and to pit us against one another.
The fate of the Republican anti-healthcare bill shows that it can be done. The key is to expose the cost of Republican “ruggedness” in the most human terms possible and for the broadest range of people that is reasonable.
Indifference or outright cruelty are hallmarks of conservative legislation. There will be a way to put a human face on the imposed suffering. There will be a way to show how it undermines the value of “we”, the basis of the social contract.
Conservatives recognize no “we”: no shared destiny, no shared responsibility, no common good, and no general welfare. Republicans invented the rugged-individual scam because they despise real individuals. The whole of their philosophy is that their wealth and comfort are to be financed by our ruggedness and suffering. Democrats need to say exactly that.
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A late edit: I did not intend to disparage the Cajun Navy, and I do not believe that I did. The point was their usurpation by conservatives.