Room 101

From 1984 by George Orwell:

The door opened. With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man.

'Room 101,' he said.

There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston's side. The man had actually  flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hand clasped together.

'Comrade! Officer!' he cried. 'You don't have to take me to that place! Haven't I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and I'll confess straight off. Write it down and I'll sign it--anything! Not room 101!'
...

'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'

Behind the seething anger of Donald Trump's mob of dog-loyal bigots and imbeciles -- behind the sneers and the scowls and the braying idiocy --

-- you'll find fear.

Or, rather, terror.  Genuine, existential terror.

Which at first blush seems impossible.  After all, less than a year ago these meatheads were granted their most fervent political desire.  In January of 2017 they were given unified control of all branches of the federal government -- the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court.  And it was everything they had dreamed of.  Trump began rolling back everything Barack Obama had ever touched and throwing immigrant children in cages, and everywhere the streets ran with glorious Liberal tears.

So what exactly could these meatheads possibly be afraid of?  Deficits?  Big Gummint?  Czars? Mexicans?

Of course not..

Even a cursory glance at the history of the modern Republican Party has shown again and again that they Do Not Give A Shit about any of that. In fact, every time one of their guys blow a bigger hole in the budget, or trashes our alliances, or lies us into the wrong war, or gets caught looting the treasury or torturing people, they just cram more stupid in their ears and Turn Rush Up Louder.

After all, if you just hide the (D) when you talk about a policy proposal, it turns out most Republicans are in favor of a whole lot of things which Democrats have championed.  Most of them like the Affordable Care Act (as long as you don't call it Obamacare) and would even support a single-payer heath care system.  A large majority support stricter gun control and registration.  Most think Roe v. Wade should be left alone and that the very rich need to pay more in taxes.

So why would these same people keep electing Republican governors and legislatures who (for example) would let 15,000 of their friends and neighbors die every year rather than do something as simple as expanding Medicaid?

Because to the average, dumbass Republican voter, actual policy -- what government actually does or does not do -- is almost entirely beside the point.  Because they only know what they hear on Hate Radio or see on Fox News.  So if you go looking for the source of their seemingly inexhaustible rage and hysteria in the details of policy differences between Republicans and Democrats, you might as well be looking for the headwaters of the Nile using a Goody Goody Burger placemat.

 
(This photo of Goody Goody Burgers is courtesy of TripAdvisor)

And it is this failure to understand that the Right does not care at all about public policy that continues to bumfuzzle far too many leading Democrats.  It's why so many them continue to cling to the fantasy that if they could just wordsmith their most excellent and detailed plans a little better, a lot more meatheads would come around.

Nonsense.  Whatever your excellent and detailed plans may be, by the summer of 2020 they will be just another part of the Destroying Murrica Division of the Evil Commie Libtard Derp State Media Cabal.

This fundamental refusal to understand what really motivates the Republican base is also why virtually the entire Beltway media continues to push a ludicrous "a soft answer turneth away wrath" theory of politics -- the fairy tale that the nation's only hope is for Democrats to run a Reassuring Centrist who speaks fluent Both Siderese and won't raise their voice, or raise anyone's taxes or make any sudden movements that might drive the Right into an electoral frenzy and startle the Imaginary Independents into running back to Donald Trump.

But of course we already tried that, didn't we?

It was called the Great Obama Uplift Project and it rested on the assumption that if Democrats would just elected an honorable, intelligent, decent, scandal-free, humane President who would agree to ignore 30 years of escalating unhinged rage and racism in the GOP and instead offer to work with them to solve our nation's problems with an open hand and a selfless heart that they would meet him halfway.  Or a third of the way.  Or on the five yard line.

Instead, no matter how hard he tried -- no matter how many concessions he made to their increasingly ludicrous demands -- they told him to go pound sand.  They unloaded eight years of sabotage, slander, sedition, racism, conspiracy mongering on him:

Obviously these tens of millions of our fellow citizens are highly motivated by a deep and monstrous passion about something, so if has nothing to do with concerns over the deficit or Big Gummint or Czars or presidential decorum or climate change...what is it?

What is this great, unspeakable terror that lashes them on and on in the face of overwhelming evidence that what they are doing is not just wildly hypocritical but destructive and insane?

What is their "worst thing in the world"?  Their cage full of rats strapped to their heads?

What is their Room 101?

Simple.

As I warned a decade ago, their "worst thing in the world" is losing.

By selling 9/11 for a mess of wingnut pottage, the Right bought itself an anti-Liberal free-fire zone and two Presidential terms-worth of blank checks. Two terms of an alternately supportive and supine media. Two terms of catastrophe, corruption and treason protected from scrutiny by an ablative shield made out of solid "Why do you hate America?", and a promise that they could go on bareback fucking diseased monsters in the alley all night long, every night, forever and wake up each morning miraculously clean, virginal and still beloved in the eyes of God.

But they forgot that tempus just keeps fugiting along. And as time passed, the Right got so accustomed to butt-scooting their depravity all over the public square and never being called on it they simply stopped noticing that they were amassing a whole new post-9/11 public record so despicable and overflowing with Conservative atrocities that it positively dwarfed their antics during the Clinton Years.

And that brutal, meth-addict level of dependence on never being brought to book for anything they say or do left the Right completely unprepared for the one thing their leaders promised would never happen again.

Losing.

And losing has driven them a special kind of crazy; that screaming-incoherently-and-lashing-out-in-every-direction kind of cold-turkey junkie withdrawal crazy.

In the few, short months since they lost, they have emptied out their entire store of raving invective and delusion.

Losing has left them insisting that that the legally elected President of the United States somehow isn't really the President. That he is a secret enemy. A Communist. A Hitler. A Muslim sleeper cell. A Chicago gangster.

Has left them swearing that "their country" has been stolen and that somewhere hidden in secret code in a 1,000 page health care bill is a plan to murder senior citizens...

Thanks to a massively well-funded Wingnut Media Hate Machine working hand-in-glove with the leadership of the GOP, Republican voters have constructed an entire cultural identity within a carefully climate-control Bizarro Alternate Reality where everything they believe is bullshit and everyone they trust is a liar.

This, in turn, has pitted them implacably against Actual Reality where you and I live.  And the deeper they sink into their collective madness, the more they come to fear at a basic, animal level that even the slightest incursion of Actually Reality into the cesspit of racism and delusion where they live would be catastrophic.

As I warned more than a decade ago, when it comes to dealing with Republican voters, we are no longer negotiating with fellow citizens in a democracy.  Instead, we are coping with junkies on a crime spree:

...in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.

Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives...

And after Dubya had been bulldozed down the Memory Hole and that Scary Black Man stole their White House?   Eight years of screaming about Death Panels and Birth Certificates and Deficits and Tan Suits and Czars and on and on and on because it wasn't yet safe for them to do what they have always really wanted to do: victoriously parade through the streets chanting "N*gger!  N*gger! N*gger!" while we Liberals were forced to stand curbside and accept our defeat like weeping Frenchmen as the Nazis rolled into Paris.

And that triumphant, out-and-proud "Fuck Your Feelings!" Hate Parade is what Donald Trump finally delivered for them, and continues to deliver for them every day.

And now that they have embraced it, there is no going back.

Consider that during these first decades of the 21st century, this generation of Republicans have made their mark on history by throwing their wild, uncritical support behind the two worst presidents in American history, and spending the eight years between those two catastrophic Republican administrations in a state of unhinged rage and hysteria about the birth certificate of one of the best and most decent presidents in modern history.

But this plain-text reading of modern history cannot be allowed to exist because, psychologically, the idea that we on the Left have been right about the Right all along is not simply unbearable to them, it is literally unthinkable.  Now that they have permanently carved MAGA into their foreheads for all to see, the idea of any loss at all -- any repudiating fact from Actual Reality breaking into the mental spider hole into which they have sealed themselves -- is too terrifying to contemplate.

This is the Room 101 rat-filled face-cage into which decades of fealty to Fox News and Hate Radio have strapped them.  Once again, from 1984 by George Orwell:

'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'

The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think, to think, even with a split second left--to think was the only hope. Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the BODY of another human being, between himself and the rats.

This is the reason they nominated, elected and continue to unswervingly support the King of the Birthers: the man from whom they will tolerate any madness, any corruption, any treason because they believe he is all that stands between them and a terrifying Reality which would destroy them.

And this is why any political strategy based on the idea that you can reason with them is delusional and doomed to fail. 

Behold, a Tip Jar!