Stirring up the scum
The real reason Republicans are flinging their feces at the Trump verdict
Republicans are frothing at the mouth. They are enraged that their dear leader has—at long last—been caught and convicted for some of the crimes he has committed.
The media sees the flinging of feces coming from “conservatives” and labels the behavior correctly. They are sycophants. They are assailing the rule of law. They are rallying their tribe. They are circling the wagons.
Yes, all of this is true. But none of it is explanatory. These are all symptomatic behaviors. But an explanation shows why and how these behaviors arise.
Here is the explanation: Republicans are flinging their feces at their perceived enemies because they are deathly afraid.
Often, as in this case, the cause is somewhat distant from its effects. That is true here, which is why our initial labelling of the symptoms does not explain them. Let us start at the cause and derive the symptoms from it.
First, “conservatives” are pathologically fearful. They are unable to master their deep-seated fear. Every choice they make is influenced by their fear of loss and their inability to imagine a world in which loss can be managed and reduced to a tolerable minimum.
Second, their fear impels them to embrace the most simplistic, most obvious solution to their petrifying terror: power. If they have power, they can take what they want without having to worry that others will take from them. This is, of course, foolish reasoning. There will always be someone stronger than you, and the rule of power only enables them to do all the taking. Trying to assuage fear with power only creates more fear. But a weak mind grasps for the temporary relief, even if it leads to long-term suffering.
Third, to overcome the enhanced fear that comes from embracing power, terrified “conservatives” look for the most powerful person they can find and then they submit to that person, hoping he will protect them. Their fear is so overpowering that they simply capitulate to their leader, abandoning all their agency to him. The irony here is thick: they sought out the leader to prevent loss, but the leader takes everything worthwhile from them—their agency, their free will, their self-respect, their human rights. But they see all this as protection rather than violation.
Fourth, when their leader is caught by decent society and subjected to punishment for his power-mongering, anti-social crimes—crimes which his “conservative” subjects approve because of their preference for power over justice—they freak out. They threaten decent society. They try to use whatever limited power they have—limited because they have ceded most of their power to dear leader—to frighten decent society away from the leader. They need to restore their illusion that their dear leader can protect them.
That is the etiology of the deviant behavior we see among Republicans in response to Trump’s guilty verdicts. Decent America has caught and captured the braying gorilla they chose to protect them. That instantly reignites the pathological fear that impelled them to choose their alpha gorilla in the first place.
If decent society can punish their chosen protector, that means it could also punish each and every one of them. Since their preference for power makes them inclined to criminality, they know that without a master criminal to protect them, they are all susceptible to justice.
In short, they know, deep down, that their game is up.
And being the fearful creatures they are, they cannot respond in any other way but to let their fear express itself. They rage, they rant, they threaten. They look to all of their lickspittle associates for help—to state Republican parties, to the Supreme Court they have captured, to House Republicans who have a bare two-seat majority—to try to erase the judgment of decent society.
It is not enough for them to prevent serious punishment for dear leader. It is likely, for all sorts of prudential reasons, that Trump will not do jail time, even though he should be locked up if he were to be treated like any other criminal who shows absolutely no remorse for his crimes.
It is not enough because it is the judgment of decent society that punctures the illusion that power cannot be checked. The judgment must be erased if “conservatives” are to maintain their delusory belief that power can get them everything they want.
At least from the emergence of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, “conservatives” knew that their dreams of absolute power had to be tempered by the appearance of decency. That is why they created a fake political “philosophy” called “conservatism,” a fake “legal” association called the Federalist Society, fake “universities” to promote their fake “ideas.” That is why they lied to hide their persistent racism from public view, to hide their vile power-worship in order to get seats on the Supreme Court, to hide their true policies to get elected to positions of power. They knew that none of this could happen if they appeared to be as indecent as they really were.
Trump fooled these perverted personalities into believing that they could get everything they wanted without appearing to be decent. He conned them into thinking they could be as outrageously indecent as they always wanted to be, that they could say the vile things they always wanted to say, that they could commit insurrection and get away with it.
But Trump is a con man. One would think that even tremendously fearful people would eventually realize that they are being conned. When they go to prison for following Trump’s orders, when the vile things they say and the indecent behavior they exhibit ends up contracting their political tribe, causing it to lose election after election, instead of expanding it—you’d think that even a dimwit would twig to the con.
But irrational fear, especially when indulged for too long, settles into the soul and rots all its perceptions. It destroys the ability to reason, which depends on a mind trained to be free from fear. And it cripples the imagination, forcing it into the narrow channel of being able to imagine only danger.
That is why “conservatives” look at a good economy and see a bad one, why they look at decreasing crime and see increasing crime, why they look at expanding rights and see contracting rights. The American hellscape Trump described in his execrable inaugural address is the fever dream of the warped, stunted, and terrified “conservative” spirit.
That spirit has now been thrown into turmoil. Dear leader has been shown to be less powerful than Decent America. He could not repel the judgment of decency on himself. If he can’t protect himself, the “conservative” coward thinks, how can he protect me?
Better throw some feces and try to scare away Decent America.
Good luck, scum. The more feces you throw the more scummy you look. By November, the only votes you’ll be able to get are the votes of the scummiest of Scum America—about thirty-three percent of the people who live here.
Nobody is scared of your feces any more.
I agree that paranoid-driven aggression and hatred is their proximate motivation. But all such behavior—along with all violent reactions to the world—are ultimately rooted in fear.
Well, like their feces flinging cousins, they are also engaged in ritual chest thumping. This behavior is not limited to Congress, the SCOTUS is also deeply allied if not leading the way. This is NOT about fear as much as it is about paranoid driven aggression and hatred.