Democracy for Vancouver

Krugman hits the Neanderthal on the head:

…[K]now-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”
…
Remember how the Iraq war was sold. The stuff about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds was just window dressing. The main political argument was, “They attacked us, and we’re going to strike back” — and anyone who tried to point out that Saddam and Osama weren’t the same person was an effete snob who hated America, and probably looked French.
…
What’s more, the politics of stupidity didn’t just appeal to the poorly informed. Bear in mind that members of the political and media elites were more pro-war than the public at large in the fall of 2002, even though the flimsiness of the case for invading Iraq should have been even more obvious to those paying close attention to the issue than it was to the average voter.
…
All this is in the past. But the state of the energy debate shows that Republicans, despite Mr. Bush’s plunge into record unpopularity and their defeat in 2006, still think that know-nothing politics works. And they may be right.

Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.

Do you know why the British spell colour with an “ou” and we don’t? Because Frank Luntz’s Minuteman forebear thought if the colonists could be divided from the British through their common language, they would be more likely to see the British as The Other that had to be repelled. Honor and color lost their Us, theatre became theater, and the British became the effete snobs with their collective indolent, pedicured, stockinged and slippered foot on the neck of the hard-working, authentic American.

And thus a nation of loud and proud rednecks was born.

Not to get all Joseph Campbell-Noam Chomsky on you, but countries and cultures have a very hard time getting past their origin myths. Those myths not only provide a sense of ownership, but a tether of righteousness back to the Founders that is unassailable, because without those Founders the group’s very existence is in question. It is the essence of “My country, right or wrong.”

And unfortunately, in our case, it means that we are stuck with a bone-deep belief that stupidity is authentic and intelligence is suspect.

I don’t know how we get past it. I would have hoped that the depth of ignorance, dishonesty and cruelty displayed by the likes of Dummy would have disrupted our collective hallucination. But the ease with which the Republicans are able to flip the meme in their favor every four to eight years is both nauseating and depressing.

In 2000 and 2004, Bush’s Real Man of Few Words trumped the experience and education -both governmental and military - of both Al Gore and John Kerry. Now, with McCain as the nominee, “experience” and military background are the necessary qualities, despite the fact that those attributes were specifically ridiculed when GWB and the penta-deferred Cheney were the GOP ticket.

It has been hard to imagine that with the devastation wrought by BushCo, the price of gas having risen 266%, job losses in the millions, an empty treasury, a weary and worn-out military, and banks and businesses failing at a rate unseen since the Depression, that the “average American” would not see the danger of entrusting a caricature of our national character with the governance of the nation.

But the tricky thing about that stupidity-as-genius national authenticity test is that that same stupidity allows the great mass of us to be fooled again, and again, and again.

I have often thought over the last seven years that we have reached bottom, only to have the floor break open beneath me once again.

It’s not feeling all that solid just now.