INSECURITY? FEAR?

What drives the extreme Right Wing of the Republican Party to act and believe the way they do?  Listening and reading all that has been said over the past 8 years, one cannot avoid hearing the harshness in the voices offering policies that demean so many citizens of this country, while they benefit the wealthy and the powerful.  There is meanness to their tone and name calling, blaming the poor for being poor, and the needy for being needy. In their minds, people are poor because they are lazy, and if everyone adopted Ayn Rand’s attitude there would be no poor people.

  They not only strive to cut funding to education, but they ridicule the educated, and mock science.  Their America seems to consist only of their “base”, and their extremism eclipses any meaningful presentation or discussion of the full compliment of conservative ideas and policies. 

I believe they are afraid of a new world and new ideas that takes them out of their comfort zone.  They need the security of the past, a past that has been kind to them, if not the rest of the citizenry.  They are afraid, almost obsessed, of people getting something they don’t deserve.  They would rather deny help to many, so the few do not get undeserved help.  This fear renders them incapable of offering forgiveness, i.e. amnesty, so they support policies that would tear apart families and punish children, policies devoid of any compassion or caring for fellow human beings. 

And they hide their fear and insecurity behind the giant screens of, Christian fundamentalism, the evils of “big government”, and the myth of the self-made man.

Taxes have been demonized, stripped of all the civic services they allow our government to provide, because government itself is evil.  This promotes their real agenda, enhancement of the establishment and the moneyed corporations, by preventing much needed government regulations to protect us from the unscrupulous actions of too big to fail banks and industries.  (Unfortunately their “liberal” colleagues often join them, as they kiss the asses of their cash-giving supporters.)  They want a 19^th century government to serve us in the 21^st century.

This extreme thinking not only goes far beyond classic conservative thinking, it threatens our country with its “my way or no way” attitude.  Valuable conservative policies and ideas are lost amidst all the inflammatory rhetoric.  We are not a country of conservatives, or liberals.  We are a country of conservatives and liberals, and to succeed we must find a way to respectfully serve both.

Extremism, conservative or progressive is understandable, and even healthy, only when accompanied by  willingness to compromise.