Being Republican Is Now A Mental Illness
How political affiliation turned into a one-way path ending in clinical derangement
There’s an old fable concerning a frog and heated water. According to the fable, one begins with a frog sitting comfortably in cold water. Slowly one heats the water. Because the increase in temperature is very gradual, there’s never a moment at which the frog senses discontinuity and so it remains as the water grows hotter and hotter, ultimately being boiled alive.
In reality, frogs possess sufficient sensory apparatus to enable them to exit the water before it becomes too hot for comfort.
Which makes frogs vastly more intelligent than US Republican voters.
A long, long time ago it was possible for ordinary people to accept without question Republican assertions about their majestic stewardship of the US economy. By being too complacent and intellectually indolent to be bothered with something as strenuous as fact-checking, Republican voters could comfortably delude themselves into voting for a Party that has expanded the national debt and expanded federal control of daily life with every single administration since World War II while simultaneously pretending to be in favor of strict fiscal probity and “small government that leaves the little guy alone.”
Because, gee willikers grandpaw, the average person is far too occupied with gawping mindlessly at ersatz entertainments to have time for something as complicated as typing a query into a search engine or looking at any readily available data provided by the Government Accountability Office. And besides, as most US citizens are functionally innumerate and incapable of performing even rudimentary mental arithmetic it’s probable that even if they were presented with the data as a special no-effort-required gift, they’d be incapable of understanding it.
Economics, however, is abstract. No ordinary Republican voter understands, or cares, that a prime reason for their beloved Party’s reason for existence is to provide ever-more tax breaks for large corporations and the ultra-rich, all financed at the expense of ordinary people and their children and grand-children who will be forced to pay higher taxes in order to service the debt. All so billionaires can expense the costs of buying and operating their private jets. That’s just too high-faluting complicated so it can safely be ignored.
But not even the most dull-minded ignorant Republican voter living in Swamptown Louisiana can be entirely oblivious to the neo-fascist policies their beloved Party has been implementing over the last four years. Even the most stupid and retarded Republican voter is vaguely aware of the concentration camps, the institutionalized child abuse, and the violent hatred against liberals that the Trump administration and its craven enablers in the Republican Party have relentlessly spewed forth since the orange moron waddled into the White House and thereby became the most powerful special needs person in the world.
This litany of fascist behavior presents a psychological problem for Republican voters. On the one hand, as most of them are religionists, they want to believe they are the “good guys” of whom their Jesus god would approve. On the other hand, the evidence is clear: they are supporting the USA’s version of the Nazi Party. Even the most stupid Republican voter would struggle to believe that Jesus was an avid Hitler supporter.
(Well, perhaps not the most stupid, but at least some small percentage of Republican voters might struggle with the dichotomy. Even if they will never know how to pronounce the word, nor know what it means.)
So, what’s an obese Jesus-loving hate-filled heavily armed Republican voter to do?
Psychologists call inherent conflict between deeply-held beliefs psychic dissonance. When two opposing beliefs come into conflict, resolution must be achieved in order to minimize emotional turmoil. The Nazis did this by demonizing the Jews; the Soviets did it by demonizing the “kulaks” and Mao’s rabid Red Guard achieved the same end by demonizing everyone who wasn’t intellectually retarded. In all cases, tens of millions died in order that repellent stupid low-status people could feel better about themselves.
The habit of scapegoating goes back as far as human history. The Israelites would literally cast the sins of the village onto the back of a hapless goat and drive it into the desert so that they could imagine themselves to be “pure” once again.
Republican voters do the same thing today by projecting all their own evils onto their political opponents.
It’s striking that the Republican Party is full of self-hating repressed homosexuals pretending to be straight. This is why Republican politicians are invariably discovered in sleazy hotels with small boys or in airport toilets with male prostitutes. Democratic politicians don’t need to lie and self-hate because their Party embraces all sexual orientations. There’s no shame being gay if you are a Democrat, but if you’re a Republican then no matter how much you adore fellating young boys you must pretend you believe in the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman and you abhor any non-heterosexual activity. Even when you’re being sodomized by a male prostitute four nights a week.
It’s striking that the Republican Party talks endlessly of how the Democrats are destroying American moral values while Republicans actively promote the building of concentration camps, issue orders that tear terrified small children from the arms of their parents, vote for laws that turn US women into second-class citizens, and send paramilitaries into cities to perform kidnappings, unprovoked assaults, and illegal detentions in the name of “law and order.”
In other words, everything the Republican Party pretends to support, it actively undermines. And then blames the Democratic Party.
Even the most ignorant and stupid Republican voter can’t help but be aware of this in some part of their turgid rarely-used brains. And so they must take all the evil they actively support and condone and push it onto the other side. This is how they can then continue to imagine they are the “good guys.”
There’s a technical term for this behavior: insanity.
When one is clinically insane, one can believe anything at all. That’s why Republican voters are suckers for every pathetic conspiracy theory that comes along. It’s why so many Republican voters think the Earth is flat. It’s why they so easily swallow Trump’s infantile self-contradictory lies.
We know what happens when a sizeable proportion of a society becomes clinically insane. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, PolPot’s Cambodia are all testimony to the inevitable consequences of mass fear-based delusion and the rule of lies.
Of course this cannot possibly be the fate of the USA.
I mean, how could anyone be pessimistic about a nation in which there are 330 million people and more than 400 million registered firearms, mostly in the hands of intellectually impoverished lower status individuals harboring persistent resentment because of their deep-seated feelings of inferiority?
Of course those waddling mindless Republican voters attending rallies large and small with their AR-15s ostentatiously strapped to their flabby bodies don’t really mean anyone any harm, do they?
Of course the police, now heavily infiltrated by far-right extremists, won’t continue to shoot unarmed black people with total impunity as they’ve been doing since the end of the American Civil War, will they? And they won’t turn a blind eye to bus loads of right-wing and heavily armed extremists coming to harm lefty-trendy demonstrators just because they’ve been consistently doing that over the last four years, will they?
Of course the US military, in which more than 57% of enlisted men avidly support Trump and his far-right ramblings, won’t permit real and permanent harm to come to their beloved country, would they? Despite the fact so many troops sport Confederate flags on their own vehicles…
Of course the Supreme Court, now packed 6–3 with far-right judges, won’t condone Trump and his gang continuing to urinate all over the Constitution as they’ve largely done over the last four years, will it?
So we can easily see that although every other nation that’s gone down this dark road has ended in horrors, the USA will escape unscathed because Uncle Joe Biden and the Tooth Fairy will win in November and suddenly everything will be all right again.
All those far-right police will start watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and become gentle, civilized nice guys.
All those Republican conspiracy-theorist-swallowing hate-spewing voters will suddenly remember the virtues of bipartisanship and rediscover reality.
Fox News and Breibart and all the ultra-right shock jocks will suddenly realize the error of their ways and forego hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue by ceasing to lie continuously to the simple-minded and will stop filling them with fear and hate in return for lucrative advertising dollars.
The 6:3 ultra-right-wing Supreme Court will wake up to a new dawn and realize their agenda of turning the USA back into a medieval theocracy is misguided, and will vote to support civilized laws instead of overturning them.
The Republican Party will cease to be a power-at-any-price fascist organization filled with self-loathing closeted homosexuals pandering to hypocritical religious fantasists and will instead rediscover the virtues of civic responsibility.
Of course all these wonderful magical things will happen.
Of course they will.
Just wait and see.
