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host--well yes. i actually was thinking that this aspect of my engagement here would come off as you say. thing is, it may in fact be as you say, so frankly i find myself a bit caught out here.
i will say this much: thing is that i do not understand folk on the right as being fundamentally different from any of us--not in any way, frankly.
on the other hand, i have been tracking the development of this new variant of hard right ideology masquerading as simple "conservatism" for over a decade at this point, initially focussing on the milita right (it had a kind of watching-a-horror-film appeal) and learning the outlines of various really extreme rightwing folk--and i monitored the virtual disappearance of that space after oklahoma city from its curious version of being-public--only to find--to my horror--that much the same ideological position was being reprocessed by people like limbaugh very early on--limbaugh fascinated and repelled me for a while because i took him to be something of a translation machine, and watching how his discourse evolved (or devolved, depending on your viewpoint) was an interesting exercise in a process of transposition--and a really clear index of the decision taken at some level within the republican apparatus--or maybe on the part of very wealthy folk who agreed that a new populist hard right ideology could be disseminated (i dont know which)--but limbaugh proved to be an excellent case study in the ways in whcih this new conservative ideology tried to assimilate all kinds of whackjob positions that had perviously been well to the right of the republican party and recode them as features that define his listenership--who he defined as "real americans" the "silent many" the "eternal victim" and all that.
all this to set up what i have to say here: what i understood myself to be listening to and working out was the development of a new political formation. and what struck me about this formation from the start is the extraordinary consistency of major positions across conservative folk who adhere to it...this cannot be explained by any combination of individual features, really--because they way in which these consistencies were expressed seemed ot me to inevitably come back to a type or types of argument. so i focussed on modelling this type of argument.
the predicates keep changing are internally contradictory and so forth--but the logic is pretty much the same and its general structure is, i think, most simply outlined by the model that i talked about earlier in this thread.
but this was never a formal project--i wasn't documenting so much as just hanging out and paying attention and reading--but as i spent more time thinking about this stuff, i started to get alarmed by what i saw it as entailing--and all i can say is that bushworld since 9/11/2001 has made me seem, in many ways, kinda pollyanna about it.
last thing: i work as a historian and my research has been for some time about trying to figure out how to explain and talk about the collapse of marxism as a cultural space if you like. one level of that is about discourse analysis. so i know how to do this work by now and am pretty efficient at it. and this engagement occupies a significant area in how i think about politics.
when i decided to start hanging around here i decided that i would be vague about my background and what i do and operate in citizen mode---because i find the ideology i was tracking to be almost dizzyingly repellent i wanted to provide myself with a mobile space in which to float arguments against it. but i was also really fascinated to see how various folk held together what i took to be contradictory positions, and particularly how this mechanism of dissonance reduction worked to eliminate/erase problematic information about either the ideology itself or the characters who are supposed to embody or represent it.
but the analytic side of things was always working always working. and i found that as time went on i would slip in and out of it here. the only problem that raised in my mind was that i might come across like i was not so much participating as visiting a zoo--which is not the case, but whatever, i guess i have to live with the conclusion that i could be because i set up the premises myself.
so there we are.
one other thing--i do not think that the amish analogy works except at a surface level: i do not find anything quaint about this conservative formation. i do not think that the people who see themselves and their world through it are quaint. i think they are not much different from anyone else--i assume some general factors woudl differentiate "them" from not them--like i know almost no conservatives of this type in any of the cities with which i am familiar, in which i have spent time, either directly or through anyone i know. that is very different in the suburbs, where the rest of my family lives, for example.
so when i try to work this stuff out--what is this formation, how does it work, why to people find it compelling--i am looking at a political space that enables folk with whom one might speak reasonably and hang out with and whose company you might enjoy at all kinds of levels to hold quasi-fascist views. if this was some kind of quaint backwater, it probably wouldnt interest me at all. and even if it did, there would be no sense of danger about the space (little likelihood of amish hegemony any time soon)...
dunno...i address what you say the only way i can.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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