Amerika

Almost all of human history has been a story of us talking around the problem, trying to re-orient our own minds so that we have a convenient explanation — not necessarily a factual, or practical one. Politics is much the same way, and we often explain away the underlying psychology.

I think it’s time we admit that our social groups — not social classes, but groups, oriented by personality — determine with whom we associate. Some of us are more social than others, and some are more studious or athletic.

The studious may be the most interesting group, because it’s the widest. It includes athletes who like to get good grades and work hard all the way through the most bedraggled nerd who knows how to study but faints if a girl talks to him. Study can after all remove your mind from living in the world.

But if one of those bedraggled nerds accidentally stumbles out in front of the group, suddenly he’s in the spotlight. He may be able to understand imaginary numbers, but can he compete on the only real level playing field out there — socialization?

Even worse, he bumps into a cheerleader, mumbles an apology and then stammers out something awkward.

We all know what comes next: one of the class bullies, generally kids who face abuse at home and no future after school, detaches from a nearby wall to mock the nerd.

But who empowers the mockery? Standing behind the bully is the Audience, or people who laugh when the bully gets in a good one. They’re what drives the bully, because the bully doesn’t get that affirmation at home. Without an audience to laugh, to mock the nerd for not being socially competent, a bully is nothing. And then he has to go back to being the abused kid with no future.

The audience who empowers the bully — those are today’s liberals. They are afraid of their own social incompetence, and perceive that if they can laugh at someone else’s incompetence, they’ve just risen a notch. They feel like part of the group when they can laugh at someone who’s definitely not in the group.

In other words, the kids who really apply the cruelty are the one who approve of the bully, making themselves and the bully united in the “accepted” group. Each needs the other: the bully needs an audience, and the audience needs someone who implicitly approves of them, not to mention feeling relieved that they will not be today’s target.

Why are liberals such bully-enablers?

But in contests across the country, Republican candidates — particularly those aligned with the “tea party” movement — are finding themselves knocked off topic as they try to explain and revise a barrage of prior statements.

…

The situation is in large part a result of a Democratic strategy aimed at changing the conversation from voters’ frustration with Democratic leaders in Washington to a portrayal of tea party Republicans as extremist. The tactic was one of the few available to Democrats saddled with a national political climate decidedly turned against them and a stubbornly slow economic recovery.

The diversion tactics seem to be working better in some races than others. However, rarely has a set of candidates given opponents so much to work with. – LA Times

After years of telling us how Republicans criticize Democrats unfairly, we’re getting treated to drama about non-issues. These are not criticisms of how Tea Party candidates might run America; this is the high school bully saying they dress funny, or are weird iconoclasts, or something. They don’t fit in!

This isn’t a new thing for liberals — they enjoy the death and suffering of others, if it makes liberals feel that sense of righteous anger and vengeance that their narrative of victimhood requires:

When Mao Tse-Tung launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966, one of the principal targets of attack were intellectuals. Thousands were silenced, beaten to death, imprisoned, tortured or sent out to the countryside to be re-educated and purified through manual labour. Many of their persecutors were university students and schoolchildren. But theirs was also a death warrant signed by fellow-travelling intellectuals in the West.

Richard Wolin advances no one theory to explain this act of betrayal. The Maoist temptation was part radical chic, part revolutionary tourism, part orientalism. It drew upon a deep-seated discontent with the corruption of Western society as well as the illusion of a radiant utopian future. It was also heavily infused with bourgeois self-hatred. By placing the emphasis on culture — the Great Helmsman was after all a poet as well as a revolutionary — Maoism offered intellectuals in Paris (if not Beijing) the opportunity to act out the role of revolutionary vanguard. So, too, it appealed to those enamoured of the invigorating and moralising qualities of popular violence. – Standpoint

We see this pattern over and over again, yet it seems to be “unpopular” to call it out in the media. What if liberalism attracts a certain type of person that rolls over to bullying and supports bullying, then blames the bully and leaves the problem for the rest of us to magically solve? Wouldn’t be surprising — that’s the last 250 years of Western history in a nutshell.