American Conservatism is Democracy's Retrovirus

Back in 2008 I wrote,

It is Now 28 Years Later

and the Conservative Hate Virus that hijacked
a political party,
a religion,
and the national media
and turned them into disease vectors
still rages merrily along.

The Conservative Hate Virus that was cultivated by Nixon and went pneumonic under Reagan destroyed Conservatism decades ago and replaced it with a slowly-rotting corpse.  A shambling, gibbering, mindless thing that, for a time, served both the RNC's electoral interests and Rupert Murdochs's business interests.  It put every bitter clinger, crackpot, bigot, gun-nut, Christopath, homophobe, Klansman, brownshirt and anti-woman douchbag and anti-science glibertarian in-harness together to pull the GOP to victory and to make thugs like Rush Limbaugh very, very rich.

And the formula for turning hate into a profit-center is so damn easy!  Just wave a flag in front of their big, vacant eyes, poke 'em with a stick (ACORN!  Commies!  Sluts! Kenyan Usurper!) every few minutes, call 'em super-patriots for jerking off to Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, and point them where you want them to go.

The Conservatism Retrovirus left us open to infection from a whole suite of  opportunistic wingnut disease, and from Falwell to Limbaugh to Beck, Conservatism has permitted each of them and all of their mutant imitators to breeze past democracy's natural antibodies -- an educated electorate, an honest press, a respectful politics -- and settle in for a nice, long parasite feast.

Andrew Breitbart was just such an opportunistic disease: another ratfucking bastard child of Lee Atwater and Roy Cohn who took a sociopath's glee in the wide, pestilential path he carved through America's political media. He destroyed people and pissed on their graves for fun and profit and prospered because he completely understood and embraced what a collection of monsters and meatsticks the Right truly is.

Mr. Breitbart didn't just get things terribly wrong: he was an able and eager leader of the dregs of American culture whose flock giddily embraced darkness and evil.  As I wrote back in 2010:

The People of the Lie

"[Narcissists]...project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others." 

— M. Scott Peck, "People of the Lie"

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid any attention whatsoever to the Conservative Movement for the last 30 years that the Breitbart BigGovernmentMiscreant site has quickly rallied itself to respond to the glaringly indisputable fact that its owner is a lying shitbag.

I hope you weren't waiting for an apology...

Here's the headline:

From JournoList to Shirley Sherrod: The Left’s Default Response Is Fascism

by John Nolte...

Since I don't link to sites run by liars and frauds, if you want any more of Nolte's scintillating defense of his meal-ticket, you'll have to Google it yourself. Suffice it to say, you'll probably want to have a Kevlar sick bag on hand.

I post it here today (along a few of the comments it generated) to underscore a larger, sadder and much more important point: sooner or later, Liberals as a Movement must come to terms with the fact that people like Breitbart -- who operate with a free hand and a blank check at the very heart of the Conservative Movement -- are not simply crazy or misguided or possessed of a strange but equally sincere ideology, but genuinely evil.

And the reason we keep banging our heads when trying to cope with evil is that evil renders our entire Liberal toolbox worse than useless.

Evil doesn't care about policy or governance. At. All. Which is why we are so often reduced to a spluttering "But don't they realize...?" incomprehension when the Right stomps on the throat of the weak and defenseless...again. While smiling...again

Evil does not have a conscience which can be appealed to, or a sense of shame which can be invoked.

Evil doesn't give a shit about fair play or reason or causality or the niceties of democracy.

When faced with positive proof that what it is doing will harm others, Evil says "Go piss up a rope, hippie."

"Evil deeds do not make an evil person. Otherwise we would all be evil. If evil people cannot be defined by the illegality of their deeds or the magnitude of their sins, then how are we to define them? The answer is by the consistency of their sins. While usually subtle, their destructiveness is remarkably consistent. This is because those who have "crossed over the line" are characterized by their absolute refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness." — M. Scott Peck, "People of the Lie"

What evil has in place of a conscience is vanity, megalomania, greed and an all-encompassing fear that they will be found out and ridiculed for being the wretched, little scuttlefish that they are. 

They live in terror that someone might see the sorry state of their mingy soul, which is why they band together for protection under the banner of an ideology which glorifies cruelty and heartlessness, and why they reserve their most furious hellfire for kindest of people.

This is why they hate Shirley Sherrod -- a woman they did not even know existed a week ago -- with such hysterical, berserk fury, why they eagerly swallow every ACORN lie that churns out of the Breitbart/Beck/Limbaugh Paranoid Conspiracy Factory and beg for more: to Evil, those who advocate publicly on behalf of kindness, justice and compassion, and who -- by lesson and language -- implore their fellow citizens to assay their souls in a clear and Christian light are the sources of scalding pain.

Every act of decency rubs Evils' nose in the horror of its polluted existence, and every public gesture of confession and humanity threatens extinction.

Faced with these threats, Evil has no recourse but attack!attack!attack! 

...

The estimable Ta-Nehisi Coates puts the matter more kindly here:

... That is what took me to sadness. I have experienced curiosity as a primarily selfish endeavor. It originates in the understanding of the brevity of life, and the desire to see as much of it as possible, from as many angles as possible without doing too much damage to my morality. The opposite of that -- incuriosity, dishonesty, the opportunistic deployment of information -- is darkness. Breitbart died, like all of us will, in darkness. But as a media persona he chose to also live there, and in the process has impelled countless others to throttle themselves into the abyss.

I have heard it said by some fellow liberals that Breitbart was in fact a good person, that his public persona was not the same as his private. This kind of praise is so broadly true of most controversial public figures as to be meaningless. And it is irrelevant. Breitbart may well have been an excellent father and a great friend but that is not why we are talking about him. We are noting his death because of the impact he had on our politics and our conversation. It must be said that that impact was for the worse. Any talk of his private life, is an attempt to change the subject and avoid discomfiting truths. ...

but I believe however gently we choose our words, the moral of Mr. Breitbart's brief and ugly life is blunt and clear.

The children Mr. Breitbart tragically left behind are his progeny.

But the lesson that he left behind -- that among Conservatives is now considered a noble thing to turn a buck selling comforting lies to moral degenerates -- is his true and tragic legacy.