Incredulity Watch, Ctd.

Over in the Conservative Expatriate Tree Fort, Andrew Sullivan continues to relish cock-punching the same Movement which made his career possible.

Well good for him.

Still, one of the poor habits that can come with deciding to make one's living biting the ankles of the monster you helped animate seems to be a tendency towards wishful thinking: towards low-balling estimates of how long your unholy creation is likely to rampage around and how many villagers it is likely to trample.

A small case in point here. When E.D. Kain writes:

I would suggest that perhaps the conservative movement itself is the most sacred of sacred cows here, and also the greatest impediment to conservatism as a ‘reality-based force in American politics’. More than anything, it is the movement itself which creates these closed information circuits, which revels in anti-historicism and the weaving of conservative illusion. In some ways it is also a great political force, but I also suspect that it is nearing its zenith in terms of both heat and light.

These sorts of movements by their very natures have poor immune systems which is why they guard themselves so fiercely, why they are forced to create alternative narratives, alternate histories. They are brittle. The conservative movement, for all its ferocity and political savvy, is brittle, because it relies too heavily on its own illusions – illusions which have been made in recent years all too convincing by outlets like Fox News.

Mr. Sullivan responds with this:

And when such reality-divorced movements collapse, they collapse very suddenly.

Which may sound nice, and may be a very comforting thought to someone who spent much of his adult life lending aid, comfort and intellectual cover-fire to this despicable movement, but unless Mr. Sullivan means "suddenly" in the "geological time-scale" sense of the word, the idea that "reality-divorced" movements somehow collapse fast once they are punctured by the Large-Bore Needle of Truth is fantasy of the highest order.

The absurdly "reality-divorced" Fundamentalist belief in the Bible as the literal and inerrant Word of God (and the attendant tragedies of rabidly anti-science Creationism, barbarically Levitican views on homosexuality, etc.) has been under continual assault by Reality since the Enlightenment and appears to be as frisky and nuts as ever.


As are more modern, reality-defying cults-turned-churches like Mormonism and Scientology (to name just two.)

The grotesquely "reality-divorced" European fascist movement of the 1930s drew strength from exactly the same sort of witchbag of constant lies, overt racism and seething paranoia about secret plots and internal enemies that now powers the Conservative Movement. It took a World War and the deaths of millions to stop it, and the bloodthirsty fever of it still flares back up again and again like clockwork.

And far from being something brand-new, Mr. Sullivan's own Modern Conservative Movement is itself a direct, lineal descendant of America's own Southern, White, Christian "reality-divorced" racial-purity movement. A Movement which Mr. Sullivan knows full well did not peter out in the face of facts, logic and morality, but instead drew itself up into powerful, proto-fascist nation called The Confederate States of America.

It took four years, the deaths of over 600,000 people and the massed military might of the Union to smash that "reality-divorced" movement to rubble, and yet it still remained an incredibly potent force. Potent enough to hold on, retrench and almost fully re-establish itself as the Jim Crow South 12 years later. Potent enough so that, for the last 40 years, tapping ever-more directly into its dark energy has provided the margin of victory in every major Republican victory.

As Mr. Sullivan knows full well, without America's indefatigable "reality-divorced" racist ideology, the American Conservative Movement would be nothing but rich old men whining about taxes.
Without it, there would have been no Nixon.
No Reagan.
No Bush I or II.
And no Andrew Sullivan.

If the Modern Conservative Movement were merely a weird Apocalyptic cult doing its thing in the desert, then sure, once Reality started whacking it with a stick, it would probably fall apart and scatter (except for a few who would live on in the abandoned compound and complain how everyone else had sold out and lost faith.)

But while its beliefs are every bit as "reality-divorced" as Heaven's Gate ever was, Modern Conservatism is backed by vast economic and political interests which seem mor than willing to bankroll its lunacy forever. And if Mr. Sullivan really thinks that mere facts have ever been a threat to illusion-driven, "reality-divorced" weirdos in funny hats as long as those weirdos have a powerful media and a sufficiently large war-chest at their command, then he's not half the Catholic he pretends to be.