The Bigot-Whisperers of the Right

[kpete]

Editor’s Note: The billionaires who finance the American Right have demonstrated skill and savvy in building a propaganda apparatus that can persuade millions of working- and middle-class Americans to rally in favor of tax cuts for the rich and enhanced power for corporations.

This rank-and-file self-negation may seem extraordinary, even irrational, but actually it has a long and disturbing history, as Phil Rockstroh notes in this guest essay:

The Bigot-Whisperers of the Right

By Phil Rockstroh
October 4, 2010

I was born, at slightly past the midpoint of the 20th Century, in the Deep South city of Birmingham, Alabama -- "The Heart of Dixie."

My earliest memories are of a time of societal upheaval and cultural trauma. As the world witnessed and history chronicles, Birmingham could be an ugly, mean place.

My father, employed at the time as a freelance photo-journalist, would arrive home from work, his clothes redolent of tear gas, his adrenal system locked in overdrive, his mind reeling, trying to make sense of the brutality he witnessed, perpetrated by both city officials and ordinary citizens, transpiring on the streets of the city.

The print and media images transmitted from Birmingham shocked and baffled the nation as well. But there was a hidden calculus underpinning the architecture of institutionalized hatred of the Jim Crow South. The viciousness of Birmingham's white underclass served the purpose of the ruling order.

..............

Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS) -- a pathology manifested in personalities who have been traumatized by authority, but who seek to assuage the hurt and humiliation by identification with their victimizer.

This phenomenon is what is at the root of the rage rising from the faux-populist Right: the ground-level realities of life in the corporate state are vastly incommensurate with the capitalist hagiography they hold in their heads.

Moreover, when one's mental imprinting and social conditioning is challenged, one can find oneself in a bewildering place. Though the state is emotional in nature, it feels akin to being physically lost ... same disorientation, same sense of panic.

Many people were never given and/or didn't develop a compass of logic by which to navigate the novel landscape that one is cast into when one's sacred beliefs are challenged. This is why change is a long time coming, and when it arrives it will not be greeted fondly.

more:
http://consortiumnews.com/2010/100410b.html