I know, I know, you are quite probably sick of hearing people’s pet peeves theories about the Tuscon Massacre by now, but it’s the sort of thing that takes the public consciousness a while to full absorb, and I, as a humble tiny organ on the body politic, feel I must do my share.
As a shocked and reeling world combs through everything about Loughner’s life in its attempt to understand what happened and answer the eternally evasive and perhaps unanswerable question of “Why?”, one thing is becoming quite clear to me.
Loughner might not quite pass the sniff test to be a Republican, but he was clearly a Libertarian.
It has been de rigeur since the days of Reagan for all conservatives to don a coat of libertarianism in order to give their base cruelty, greed, shortsightedness, ignorance, and evil a paper-thin coating of legitimate self-righteous populism. It’s not that we’re unevolved reptiles who hiss with anger and confusion at mammalian concepts like “compassion” and “cooperation. Honest! It’s about, you know, freedom and stuff. Government is bigger than you! Aren’t you scared of it? If we make it smaller, it’s like you getting bigger!
And you love money, right? Well it turns out, you can use your vote to get more money! It’s not technically legal for us to bribe you with our own money for your vote, but it’s totally legal to bribe you with your own money to vote for us! We love that, it’s so cheap! You know, for us.
Of course, for most of them, it is complete and utter bullshit. When their guy is in power, expanding government power is the right and true and patriotic thing to do, and anyone who mentions “rights” is a dirty commie homo traitor who should be drug out in the streets and shot. A Democrat get in the White House, and suggests that maybe we use government power to help people instead of killing them with war or the electric chair, and suddenly it’s the Democrats who will send jackbooted thugs into your home.
Think about it : there is no way any libertarian could support the death penalty. If the government does not have the right to take your money by force, then it sure as hell does not have the right to take your very life by force, no matter what you’ve done.
Clearly, the important part is enjoying watching people die. To these people, the right to life is not nearly as important as the right to keep your money. Money has rights. People do not. As long as it involves good reptile-brain friendly things like war, police beating people up, fear of foreigners, alpha males becoming massively powerful, or anything else involving people in uniforms making people suffer.
Now, with an event like the Tuscon Massacre so clearly glaring at them accusingly, though, suddenly conservatives are taking their dusty old pre-Reagan conservatism (what I call “Establishment conservatism”) out of the closet to try to distance themselves from the killer.
And it’s true that Loughner is no Republican. That’s because he’s a real, actual libertarian.
After all, by trying to kill Gabrielle Giffords, he was really just striking a blow for the little guy against massive bloated over-powerful government, right? One less Congresswoman means one less government official sponging off the people and pushing the USA towards tyranny and death panels, right?
So thanks to Reagan and his wrapping up all the petty and mighty evils of conservatives in a blanket of libertarian self-aggrandizing righteousness, the modern day American Right simply cannot claim that they have no connection at all to Loughner and his anti-government insanity.
The real crime, the connection by which the American Right is condemned for this atrocity, is that what Loughner did was perfectly in keeping with the literal truth of what Sarah Palin and Fox News says.
When the only difference between an insane killer like Loughner and the actual Republican Party is that Loughner acts on the words they just say, something has gone seriously, seriously wrong.
Did overheated and immoderate rhetoric on behalf of Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox News alternative-reality crew directly cause Loughner to go commit his crimes? No. Crazy people are crazy no matter what, and the news of the day might trigger something, but if it hadn’t, something else would have.
But there is simply no way the American Right can completely disavow any connection with a fellow libertarian who did the very thing a lot of them have been openly discussing for a decade.
Taking government by force.
And yet, they will try anyway, pointing to the fact that he had a copy of The Communist Manifesto.
I’ve never understood why libertarianism is considered more respectable than republicanism. With republicanism, there’s at least the possibility that they think what they think because they want what’s best for average American; with libertarianism, their central belief is “Fuck everyone else.”
It’s because Americans have a freedom fetish and a wild excess of individualism, and American libertarians are quite adept at dressing themselves up, sometimes literally, as the Founding Fathers, just fighting for the Constitution and the individual against Big Bad Gubmint.
Plus, and this is vital, it lets Baby Boomers be in total denial about becoming Republican conservatives just like the parents they rebelled against so long ago. No, I didn’t sell out and become my Dad… I’m a still a rebel, I’m still cool! I fight for the little guy! Like me, a rich middle class otal sellout who values money more than humanity!
Just like when I was a hippie!
Hippies. Reading a lot of John Kricfalusi’s blog lately I’ve noticed that he blames the hippies for the trends he hates in animation. He’s got Douglas-Coupland-era Generation-X anti-Baby-Boomer resentment, but instead of the “We’re young fast-trackers and the Baby Boomers won’t get out the workforce and let us get promoted” kind, he’s of the “Things were better under Eisenhower” kind.
This also raises a point that I’ve been thinking about for the last few years. I liked the popular culture of the 1980s, which was completely different from the popular culture of the 1960s. But the popular culture of the 1980s was largely decided by people who imprinted on the 1960s. So you have Baby Boomers, who wish it were the 1960s, making the most quintessentially eighties pop culture of the 1980s.
Hmmm. One might call it “decade echo”. Think of how much 80’s culture informs what people our age do today, and yet, it’s totally different. The past is embroidered deeply into the tapestry of the present.