EXPLAINING THE CRAZY: What explains the growth of The Crazy?

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2013

Part 1—Kevin Drum asks: Yesterday, Kevin Drum asked a very important question. The question appeared in a headline to a new post:

“Why Are So Many People in a Blind Rage These Days?”

As it turned out, Drum really was asking a different question: Why are so many conservatives in a blind rage these days?

That’s an important question too, although it’s different from the question posed in that headline.

As Drum’s post proceeded, the actual shape of his question became more clear. He quoted a post in which Paul Waldman ruminated about the “craziness” of “Republican members of Congress.”

For ourselves, we think it tends to mark the end of discussion when one party declares the “craziness” of the other. That said, there’s been a lot of crazy conduct and crazy belief floating around these days—actually, for the past several decades.

(No, Virginia! Bill and Hillary Clinton didn’t murder a whole lot of people. Bill Clinton didn’t run drugs through the airport at Mena.)

“Why Are So Many People in a Blind Rage These Days?” As he continued, Drum gave the conventional answer to this question. Then, for reasons he didn’t explain, he said this answer doesn’t quite do it for him:
DRUM (10/1/13): This is conventional wisdom, of course. The reason the tea party caucus isn't willing to compromise is because there's no pressure on them to compromise. Their constituents are as crazy as they are. They want the safety net slashed, taxes cut, the EPA put out of business, and the Fed eliminated. They believe that Obamacare is the thin edge of the wedge that's driving America into decline and ruin. They believe this so strongly that they're willing to do anything to turn the country around. If that means government shutdowns and financial panic, so be it.

But why? There's always been a faction of right-wing craziness in America. It's part of our DNA. But how did it become so widespread? The usual answer involves the rise of conservative think tanks, conservative talk radio, Fox News, the Christian right, and racial resentment toward a black president. And maybe that's it. Somehow, though, it doesn't feel quite sufficient. But if it's not, then what's going on? What's happened over the past decade or two to spin up so many Americans into a blind rage?

Complaining about tea party congressmen misses the big picture. The problem is the people who voted them into office. What happened to them?
Why is there so much “right-wing craziness” these days? Why are the people who elected those Republican congressmen so much crazier than conservatives used to be?

Drum gave the conventional answer, the one involving the rise of talk radio, partisan “think tanks” and of course Fox News. He even threw in “racial resentment toward a black president.”

Still, he said, these conventional explanations don’t feel sufficient to him.

Can we talk? Those conventional explanations do feel sufficient to us! In our view, the past few decades have constituted a remarkable experiment in the true nature of human nature. Here’s the way it has worked:

The so-called democratization of media has created a world in which it’s easy to hear crazy, dishonest, or partisan people telling you crazy things which fit your preconceptions. Back when there was less “right-wing craziness in America,” it was actually fairly hard to hear people say crazy things.

Walter Cronkite wasn’t crazy; neither was David Brinkley. If you wanted to hear crazy ideas or ridiculous claims, you had to seek them out. You had to go to the corner bar and talk to the crazy guy in the corner. You had to send away to John Birch or to similar orgs.

Now, The Crazy is everywhere; The Crazy is very big business. It’s very easy to hear crazy claims which fit your preconceptions. And uh-oh! In our view, here’s what we’ve learned about human nature as this experiment has played out:

It’s easy to get people to believe Crazy Things! You just have to let people hear them!

Plainly, Drum isn’t crazy. He strongly tends toward the sober; that's why we like his work. We’re just guessing: This may explain why Drum is so puzzled when he sees so many people believing so many crazy things.

To him, the picture still doesn’t compute. He understands the theory of the way The Crazy spreads. But to him, it still seems odd to think that we humans are prone to believing The Crazy to this impressive extent.

We’ve been surprised by the last few decades too, but the conventional wisdom does seem sufficient to us. In part, that may be because we’ve allowed ourselves to see The Crazy spreading a bit among our own tribe too.

In our view, Kevin’s post comes from an ancient tribal warp in which only The Others are crazy. His headline seemed to be ecumenical. His analysis was not.

In a very seminal post, Drum turns out to be explaining one of the race’s oldest questions: Why is the other tribe so crazy? We’ll suggest that, in this new piece by Joan Walsh at Salon, we see a wider swath of We the People behaving in Slightly Crazy Ways too.

All liberals know how to respond to such claims. We know that we should denounce such statements as “moral equivalence.”

This has become a Key Tribal Skill. And alas! It’s part of the ongoing problem!

All the way back into prehistory, we humans have always known one thing. We’ve always known that The Crazy and Vile can only be found among Them.

Tomorrow: In what way is Walsh’s piece perhaps just a bit semi-crazy? Also this:

Are writers like Walsh “in a blind rage these days?” Perhaps just a small tiny bit?

Still to come: King and Mandela!

28 comments:

  1. Could part of the "crazy" be that people like Pastor Bob don't want to display the bad taste of using the phrase "Government Shutdown" on this particular morning? Whatever. Thomas Frank gets to the heart of things much more effectively than either Kevin Drum or Pastor Brown over at Salon this morning. Here in the Church of Pastor Bob, Joan Walsh must always be nailed to the cross for the sins of Right America. And even Kevin Drum mentions race, can you IMAGINE?
    There is something worth noticing in George Will's shift over to Fox News. Obviously, ABC doesn't want to pay Will in the lordly fashion to which he has become accustomed, and our most respected, supposedly intellectually credible right winger is willing to trash it up with the slobs. Will, like the heroes of old Bob dreams of with his rose colored glasses, was never as perfect as advertised. What the Church of Pastor Bob cannot allow is that conservatives are greedy, stupid people, and Obama was reelected only because he stopped trying to behave like a member of the First Church of Pastor Bob.

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    1. No other blog would tolerate such trolling, but you are too stupid to be thankful to be allowed to comment at all and persist in being a crazy, crazy rotten-spirited troll.

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    2. ? I guess there is also a cult of Pastor Bob.

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    3. There is only one BOB.

      KZ

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  2. OMB

    Due to lack of static interference from earthly American gvernmental sources, Radio BOB is coming through loud an clear on Planet Doom
    this fine rotation.

    We mostly agree with his BOBship.

    In honor of that we ask, "Who put the Bop in the Bop in the Bop-she-bop she-bop, who put the Ram in the Ram-a-lama-ding dong, and who the
    "Moral" in Moral equivalence?

    And where oh where can my BOBby be? When will his writing lose the hypocrisy?

    KZ

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    1. Well, I know I'm not as smart of you two city fellers, Greg and KZ (KRAZ?), so could you explain the "rose colored glasses" bit, and the "hypocrisy," please?

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    2. The "good old days" of Walter and David were not all they were cracked up to be, hence my "rose colored glasses" comment. Walter did plenty of cheerleading for Vietnam before he faded on it. David Brinkley, by the end, showed himself to be a rather mean spirited reactionary. It's true, the was a general feeling to keep things a little more classy and adult, but there was always a trashy and reactionary aspect that slowly took over.

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    3. Sorry Horace. KZ stands for King Zarkon, science fiction game ruler of the planet Doom. Zarkon was the
      name of the planet BOB sarcastically place Doris Kearns Goodwin upon when he said something which displeased him. Which gets us to your second question, about hypocrisy.

      Bob is fond of tunes from the middle of the last century
      (nothing hypocritical about that, buit it does explain why somebody pushing forty could be called "youngish" by old BOB).

      So we thought we would include some sixties lyrics in honor of our finding nothing particularly hypocritical in this post. We thought maybe BOBby had gone to heaven so we ought to be good.

      He fell right back into the pattern with his next effort, however. See my comments there for many examples.

      If you would like more from my excellent play list, copy, paste, and click.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMuWmC5urcI

      KZ

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    4. By the time someone gets a PhD they are close to 30 (or over 30 if in the humanities). It takes at least 10-12 years after that to get tenure and be promoted to Professor. Someone who has been working for only 10 years and is about 40 is thus youngish in their profession. Since Bob was talking about an academic, anyone familiar with academia would have understood what he meant and it is a correct description of them professionally. They are youngish as academics. But isn't that a quibble?

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    5. Anon @ 3:41

      BOB is talking here about tribal behavior. He derides the use of moral equivalence defenses.

      It is interesting that one of the BOBfans would take an insult to BOB's musical choices being the result of his"silver" years status as a signal to defend BOB, the chief of this cybervillage in the manner you have chosen.

      You have sandwiched your labored defense of BOB in part on the false premise that his effort to insult someone's age was not really an insult because he was referring to one of our fine academics. He was referring to a writer with a bachelor's degree, and, as best I can tell, with no futher academic credential pursuits. But I too quibble.

      The other slice upon which you rest the meat of your argument is that a hard working humanities professor, who got their PHD in their thirties and a dozen year later is still untenured would be correctly described as "youngish" professionally. I am not familiar with any institution of higher education where that would be the case. At those with which I have been associated, in both successful pursuit of degrees and in employment, such persons are usually described as unhireable.

      But the meat of your argument is the implication that I am unfamiliar with academia, an elitist insult BOB regularly describes here in reference to Liberalworld. I could defend my credentials, but I would rather use the famous words of that great chieftan BOB to dismiss your milquestoast false quibblings:

      "Who needs professors?"

      KZ (From Doom, Where Dissertation Dalliance is a Disgrace)

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  3. Here's the gist of what Joan Walsh wrote at Salon:

    "You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else... Reagan and his strategists succeeded in making government synonymous with 'welfare,' and 'welfare' synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American."

    Is there really any question but that Republicans want to eliminate Medicaid, cut Medicare, and privatize Social Security? The Republican economic orthodoxy is more tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and more laissez-faire regulatory policy.

    Meanwhile, if only those crappy, mediocre public schools would improve their performance, why then American "economic competitiveness" would boom and soar and it'd be Reagan's "morning in America" again.

    Sigh. Reagan and Bush1 more than quadrupled the national debt, while siphoning big money from the Social Security trust fund and piling up huge trade deficits. The American standard of living was undermined while investment dollars flowed offshore. Jobs followed. Bush2 resurrected supply-side policies, let Wall Street run wild, refused to fund two wars, and broke the economy.

    And now, we have mouthpieces for the corporate "elite" –– like the "talented," privileged Amanda Ripley –– spewing the nonsense that America's economic future depends on the test scores of 15-year-olds.
    Apparent proof that even an Ivy league education can produce some very sloppy thinking.

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  4. Here's the gist of what Joan Walsh wrote at Salon:

    "You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else... Reagan and his strategists succeeded in making government synonymous with 'welfare,' and 'welfare' synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American."

    Is there really any question but that Republicans want to eliminate Medicaid, cut Medicare, and privatize Social Security? The Republican economic orthodoxy is more tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and more laissez-faire regulatory policy.

    Meanwhile, if only those crappy, mediocre public schools would improve their performance, why then American "economic competitiveness" would boom and soar and it'd be Reagan's "morning in America" again.

    Sigh. Reagan and Bush1 more than quadrupled the national debt, while siphoning big money from the Social Security trust fund and piling up huge trade deficits. The American standard of living was undermined while investment dollars flowed offshore. Jobs followed. Bush2 resurrected supply-side policies, let Wall Street run wild, refused to fund two wars, and broke the economy.

    And now, we have mouthpieces for the corporate "elite" –– like the "talented," privileged Amanda Ripley –– spewing the nonsense that America's economic future depends on the test scores of 15-year-olds.
    Apparent proof that even an Ivy league education can produce some very sloppy thinking.

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    1. Nobody has "siphoned" money from the Social Security Trust Fund. Its value combining FICA tax revenues + interest less benefits paid + administrative is exactly what it should have been. As a matter of law, the fund builds its value in the form of treasury bonds, which by definition means the money is lent to the General Fund with an obligation to be repaid by the General Fund with interest when it is needed to pay benefits. "Siphoned" usually means money is taken out of the fund and used for other purposes. Lending is not the same thing as using. The money is still there, and as a matter of law may not be used for any purpose other than paying benefits and administrative costs.

      This is all set forth as a matter of law. The only reason the treasury bonds you hold have any value is because the repayment is established as a matter of law. If you beklieve in the rule of law, the instruments in the Social Security Trust Fund are every b it as real as any other financial interest. Saying they are "mere IOUs" is just stupid, and shows complete disrespect for the importance of the rule of law.

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    2. In fact, surpluses from the Social Security trust fund are "siphoned" and spent elsewhere. Reagan did a lot of this...the failure to raise taxes and to deficit spend exacerbates the problem. Unfunded tax cuts, the orthodoxy of the Republican party, fuels the spree.

      Yes, by law the surplus is converted to U.S. treasuries. But notice that Republicans and members of the Bowles-Simpson Commission – and plutocrats – are arguing that Social Security benefits must be cut. And in essence, that means that money diverted into treasuries will not purchase what they previously did.

      You may believe in the "rule of law," but Republicans and Wall Streeters and plutocrats do not...unless it somehow works to their advantage.

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  5. Here's the gist of what Joan Walsh wrote at Salon:

    "You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else... Reagan and his strategists succeeded in making government synonymous with 'welfare,' and 'welfare' synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American."

    Is there really any question but that Republicans want to eliminate Medicaid, cut Medicare, and privatize Social Security? The Republican economic orthodoxy is more tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and more laissez-faire regulatory policy.

    Meanwhile, if only those crappy, mediocre public schools would improve their performance, why then American "economic competitiveness" would boom and soar and it'd be Reagan's "morning in America" again.

    Sigh. Reagan and Bush1 more than quadrupled the national debt, while siphoning big money from the Social Security trust fund and piling up huge trade deficits. The American standard of living was undermined while investment dollars flowed offshore. Jobs followed. Bush2 resurrected supply-side policies, let Wall Street run wild, refused to fund two wars, and broke the economy.

    And now, we have mouthpieces for the corporate "elite" –– like the "talented," privileged Amanda Ripley –– spewing the nonsense that America's economic future depends on the test scores of 15-year-olds.
    Apparent proof that even an Ivy league education can produce some very sloppy thinking.

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  6. Anonymous at 10:08 really likes the sound of his/her own voice.

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    1. That comment was only posted once....I have no idea why it appeared three times.

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  7. Consider the enormity of Bob's crime here: not content with blaming both parties equally for every crisis and failure of governance (as do most journalists), he goes out of his way to find instances of tribal conduct to "prove" that "our side" is just as irrational as theirs.

    Of course, the actual policy questions are, for Bob, irrelevant. You see, it's all about *attitude*. And "our" attitudes are just as bad as theirs!

    Alas for Bob, But "attitude" doesn't govern the country. Policy does (well, jeez). Name, for example, the predominant liberal myths of our time -- meaning public policy absurdities perpetrated by self-interested, deluded or fanatical liberals. Socialized medicine? Progressive taxation? Government regulation? These being the norms of civilized industrial democracies, where exactly is the madness, unless one is prepared to reject Western civilization in toto?

    Meanwhile let's consider prevailing "conservative" myths: life began 6000 years ago in the Garden of Eden, cutting taxes increases revenues, Obamacare is end of freedom, the market solves all problems, food stamps do poor children a great disservice, social security is a ponzi scheme, etc. etc. etc.

    In this face of this absolute non-equivalence, Our Bob bis reduced to citing false claims about George Zimmerman occurring cable TV, as proof of his Tribal theory. And if Mr. Z were capable of shutting down the government and provoking a debt default, he, and "liberal" attitudes about him, might be worth discussing a few hundred times.

    But of course, that won't stop Bob and his narrative. It's just gotta be this way. We're as bad as they are!

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    1. Bravo. Well said.

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    2. Yep....there are some bigger fish to fry....

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  8. Crazy people have always been with us. Only years ago you met them personally. In the late 1960s a guy in my neighborhood was always fuming about how the Pope and the Catholic Church were undermining American life. And you couldn't argue with him. He believed he was always right. I got an insight into how his brain worked when one day he sneered that he couldn't understand why everyone was so excited that Pope Paul VI said mass in Yankee Stadium on his U.S. visit. "After all, he owns it," the guy said (the Catholic Church secretly owned everything to him). I replied that at the time CBS owned Yankee Stadium and the New York Yankees; not the Pope. A few days later the guy approached with yet another conspiracy, "Did you know the Catholic Church owns CBS?" Then guys like him only reached a few people. Today with the Internet they reach millions.

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    1. An interesting story. The point is quite valid. However, at the time of the His Holiness's 1965 Mass in Yankee Stadium, it was owned by a southern school founded exclusively for white students, not CBS. The ground itself however, may indeed have indirectly belonged to the Pope. The Knight of Columbus owned it.

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  9. "EXPLAINING THE CRAZY: What explains the growth of The Crazy?"

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxPsXPCR5MU

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  10. The news media may be involved - they have changed since TV became available. You don't even have to be able to read to keep up with the news or whatever it is that appears on cable TV. But there is a more fundamental answer to why politics is crazier than it was 60 years ago. The realignment of the parties created a situation in which the plutocratic faction of the Republican party had to appeal to racism, religious bigotry and sectional antagonism on the part of the "conservative" lower-income members of the party. In fact this is how such people were attracted to the party to lend their support to tax-cutting and other things which enrich the 1%. Keeping the 99% among Republicans in line involves stoking racial hatred and religious intolerance, which is transferred to partisan hatred and intolerance.

    Apparently Bob thinks the way out of this is just to ignore the blatant racism - try to get people to see which way their material interest lie. Others think racism has to be attacked more directly and reduced before these nature of these interests will be visible to the haters.

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  11. Drum asks

    "Complaining about tea party congressmen misses the big picture. The problem is the people who voted them into office. What happened to them?"

    but earlier drum gave the answer: "...the rise of conservative think tanks, conservative talk radio, fox news, the christian right, and racial resentment toward a black president." - drum

    >>> these things changed the people. they didn't act independently of the people or just thru the people as simple agents.

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  12. Back before the Civil War there was extreme partisanship, based on the issue of slavery, and a major sectional rivalry about which part of the country would control government. Southern Democrats reacted to the election of Lincoln even more drastically than (Southern) Republicans reacted to the election of Clinton or Obama. This rivalry and partisanship subsided somewhat after the Civil War, but it was deliberatedly revived by the new Republicans after realignment in the Civil Rights era.

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    1. According to TDH, abolitionists were as bad as unrepentant slaveholders. Those who claim that's false equivalence are just being tribal. We know they are being tribal because they claim it is false equivalence, because the people in that tribe have been trained like seals to say that. TDH was a philosophy major at Harvard? Maybe its philosophy department is as bad as its economics department.

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  13. "If you wanted to hear crazy ideas or ridiculous claims, you had to seek them out. You had to go to the corner bar and talk to the crazy guy in the corner. You had to send away to John Birch or to similar orgs."

    Well, I assume TDH knows the Koch Brothers, who may be funding virtually all of the craziness, are the sons of one of the founders of the John Birch Society. Fred Koch, according to a Wikipedia section that a a quick of his "book" on Communism appears to validate, said the following:

    "He claimed that the Democratic and Republican Parties were infiltrated by the Communist Party, and he supported Mussolini's suppression of communists. He wrote that 'The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,' and that public welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks and Puerto Ricans to Eastern cities to vote for Communist causes and 'getting a vicious race war started.'

    Sure, just like Joan Walsh except on the other side. Sometimes false equivalence is false equivalence. I'd love to see the substantive defense arguing that it's not here. Insulting people who disagree is not a defense.

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