Tea Party’s fringe isolation: How a conspiracist mind-set poses long-term electoral danger

[DonViejo]

From economics to immigration, fear of mythical evil characterizes the loony right -- and now they'll pay the price

PAUL ROSENBERG

The week before Obama’s State of the Union, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote a piece “The Tea Party and the Hammock Theory of Poverty” in which he noted: “Here’s a striking finding: The ideas and assumptions underlying the GOP economic and poverty agenda are far and away more reflective of the preoccupations of Tea Party Republicans. Meanwhile, non-Tea Party Republicans are much more in line with the rest of the public on these matters.”

In the speech itself, Obama characteristically steered away from finger-pointing at GOP obstructionists, but his broad themes clearly struck a chord with the American people, above all his call to raise the minimum wage — a call that he cannily directed to all levels of government as well as to private businesses. The title, and core argument of Brian Beutler’s postmortem captured it well — “The Right’s Agenda Is Reviled: The Lesson From Obama’s Confident State of the Union.” The fragmented, four-part GOP “response” may have blurred the picture somewhat, but Sargent’s earlier analysis is a potent reminder that the Tea Party’s ideological isolation lies right at the core of the GOP’s problem. Their economic agenda is key to how they’ve defined themselves, but it reflects a similar, quite visible isolation on immigration and women’s issues as well. In all these areas, a conspiracist mind-set can be observed: The problem is a morally suspect out-group, being coddled and encouraged by big bad government, which is trying to destroy America, because of Evil.

Obviously, not everyone who agrees with those specific positions subscribes to the full-blown conspiracy mind-set. But the more vehemently they reject contrary evidence and arguments, the less open to honest discussion and dialogue they appear, the more powerful the evidence is that a close-minded conspiracist outlook is at work, with a chillingly narrow predetermined cast of heroes and villains. Hence, if ideologically purity is what’s wanted — as many on the right repeatedly say — it’s hard to see how that doesn’t include this conspiracist mind-set as well. It’s no accident that Glenn Beck did so much to help launch their movement.

In all three issue areas, the GOP as a whole faces real, long-term electoral dangers if the underlying logic of their actual positions becomes too clear to everyone outside their base. You can’t get people to vote for you if they know you despise them on some level. At the same time, GOP politicians individually need to make sure those positions are clear to those in their base. Their base won’t passionately support them otherwise. It’s a delicate balancing act, which Republicans are quite accustomed to in some areas — particularly when it comes to racial politics, for example. But what happens when too many people start catching on — as seems to have happened with women and Hispanic voters in 2012, for example? And now a further complication: What happens when a whole new category of people gets added — the poor/working poor/near poor who have become increasingly indistinguishable from the middle class since the financial crisis?

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http://www.salon.com/2014/02/13/tea_partys_fringe_isolation_how_a_conspiracist_mind_set_poses_long_term_electoral_danger/