Group loyalty is a big part of politics on both sides of the fence, but as far as lefty pundit Amanda Marcotte is concerned, it’s become so inflated on the right that it often crowds out crucial things like “basic common sense.”
In a Friday Talking Points Memo column, Marcotte asserted that “conservatives are going way too far with this knee-jerk tendency to believe ‘their’ people can do no wrong and to assume ‘liberals’ are some subversive force out to destroy everything. It’s mildly amusing when Republican voters are mindlessly preferring religious nutcases” -- the Duggars -- “to a centrist liberal who probably gave them health care.”
From Marcotte’s column (bolding added):
[A poll] result—67 percent of Romney voters like the Duggars better than they like Obama—perfectly encapsulates one of the most troubling aspects of modern conservatism: the way that it’s ultimately about irrational tribal politics over everything else.
…[T]he Duggars…covered up for their son’s child molesting and encouraged him to go out there and present himself as a moral authority who lectures other people on how to conduct their consensual sex lives that involve absolutely no children at all…
But such is that nature of 21st century right-wing tribalism. The Duggars are religious cultists with downright weird ideas about hair styling, but because they’re white, sanctimonious and Republican, they inspire “one of us!” feelings in the conservative base. Add to it eight years of relentless fear-mongering from [right-wing] media about Obama…and you get creepily immoral poll answers like this.
…The Duggars are not exactly in step with the lives of regular conservatives, being adherents to a fringe form of fundamentalism often called Christian patriarchy…The sex and family lives of your average conservatives look way more like those of liberals than they do of the Duggars. If people like the Duggars got their way and were able to impose their “family values” on the rest of us by law, conservatives would be getting screwed over just as much as liberals.
It goes to show that conservative identity politics are deeply irrational, with aesthetics frequently overwhelming basic common sense. You saw the same thing going on with the Duck Dynasty brouhaha. Phil Robertson, the patriarch on that show, is a moral monster whose beliefs are so odious that no amount of religious window dressing can make them look better. It’s telling that most of his conservative defenders elide discussing what he actually says in public, trying to focus their defenses on his right to free speech, which has never actually been threatened…
Look, both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of tribalism…
But this Duggar poll and recent events generally suggest that conservatives are going way too far with this knee-jerk tendency to believe “their” people can do no wrong and to assume “liberals” are some subversive force out to destroy everything. It’s mildly amusing when Republican voters are mindlessly preferring religious nutcases to a centrist liberal who probably gave them health care.
That much was made obvious in the furor over the McKinney pool party scandal...
Now you’re seeing it starting up again in the wake of the Charleston shooting, where conservatives are…claim[ing] that this was the result of an imaginary war on Christians, instead of what it obviously is: a hate crime against people based on race…All because of this entrenched “us vs. them” mentality that’s spun so wildly out of control on the right.
