I have a thread up about reassessing Reagan, whom conservatives worship (they also tend to worship Theodore Roosevelt, oddly, who was a radical liberal, but anyway).
I've never been particularly certain on my views on Reagan, as I've noted here before. I am a conservative, but something about Reagan has made me long uncomfortable. In part, it might frankly just be because he was an actor, and I find actors to be fake. I never bought off on his persona, I guess.
I've noted here several times that Ronald Reagan started the process that gave us Donald Trump.
The Guardian just ran an article on the psychology of our political times, starting off with this:
Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
I'm not sure what I think of The Guardian either, which is a British left wing newspaper working hard to break into the US market. But this article has some interesting points, starting with this generalization:
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
Interesting. And:
Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf; from his extreme objectification of women, including his own daughter, to his obsession with the size of his hands; from his rejection of public service, human rights and environmental protection to his extreme dissatisfaction and fury, undiminished even when he was president of the United States, Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.
That is in part what has made the "left behinds" fanatic devotion to Trump so hard for me to grasp. People declaring themselves average patriotic, Christian, middle class, Americans are fanatic in their devotion to somebody who expresses none of those values whatsoever. This is so much the case, that extreme efforts have to be taken to project those onto Trump.
But here's where it gets really interesting:
We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the cues and responses we receive from other people and the prevailing mores of our society. They are also moulded by the political environment we inhabit. If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to develop.
If, by contrast, people live in a country in which no one becomes destitute, in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end. This process is known as policy feedback, or the “‘values ratchet”. The values ratchet operates at the societal and the individual level: a strong set of extrinsic values often develops as a result of insecurity and unfulfilled needs. These extrinsic values then generate further insecurity and unfulfilled needs.
I think there's a lot more that can be analyzed as to these statements, but at an elemental level, there's a large measure of truth to them. Norwegians today are a kindly, non-threatening group. That reflects a lot of things, but one of them is the Christianization of the country in the Middle Ages. That took them from a brutal society where murdering your own children was accepted, to what we have today.
Continuing on with The Guardian;
Ever since Ronald Reagan came to power, on a platform that ensured society became sharply divided into “winners” and “losers”, and ever more people, lacking public provision, were allowed to fall through the cracks, US politics has become fertile soil for extrinsic values. As Democratic presidents, following Reagan, embraced most of the principles of neoliberalism, the ratchet was scarcely reversed. The appeal to extrinsic values by the Democrats, Labour and other once-progressive parties is always self-defeating. Research shows that the further towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum people travel, the more likely they are to vote for a rightwing party.
That' is absolutely the case.
Most voters, and most conservatives alive today, don't recall the country before Reagan. They don't even recall that George Bush, who urged a "kinder, gentler, conservatism" in the race he won for the Oval Office, ran against Reagan in the 1980 GOP contest.
Reagan had a charming smile and a personal "oh shucks" type of presentation. He was running against a widely personally admired man, Jimmy Carter, whose policies had failed. He was also running at a time at which the country was desperate on inflation, and trying to figure out what had happened in the 1960s, and how the Vietnam War had gone so wrong. Hard hat Americans were losing their jobs to Japanese manufacturing. Southerners were grasping to figure out what had happened to the Old South.
It wasn't a really good time in the country.
From the election of 1912 all the way through the election of 1980, the county had been on a much different path. The three-way race of 1912 saw a Progressive (Roosevelt) dragging along a conservative (Taft) against another somewhat Progressive (Wilson). Progressivism, which first really started to come into its own during Theodore Roosevelt's administration, was on the rise and in fact became ingrained in American politics. The Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations really didn't change that, but the Franklin Roosevelt administration very much did, ramping it up enormously. The setting on the dial that Roosevelt put the country on was only turned down a couple of notches post-war, and the difference between post-war Republican Administrations and Democratic ones was slight in regard to these issues for the most part, at least until Lyndon Johnson, who tried to set the dial back up. Nixon may have set the dial back down, but by modern Republican standards, Richard Nixon was a liberal RINO.
Reagan started to pull the dial off the settings, much of it in a budget fashion. The mentally disturbed were set out on the streets as state's lost funding from the Federal Government for them. Support for education at the Federal level, a major feature of the World War Two/Cold War Federal governments, started to evaporate.
With this, a sort of fend for yourself individualism came in. The promise is that everything would improve, and everyone's lives with it. And because Reagan did tackle inflation, and he did face down the Soviet Union (which of course is more or less unrelated), things did improve.
But that's stopped.
The left deserves much of the blame as well, as it got goofy, frankly, and started to take on a universalism approach that doesn't appeal to hardly anyone, and which in fact is detrimental to the country.
But Reagan took us down a path that involved hating the government, and incorporated the disaffected into the party to be used, but not really supported. Lots of people ended up being left behind.
There were signs. His political career had been launched by his A Time For Choosing speech in favor of Barry Goldwater, who was in some ways an earlier version of the Anti Republican, Republican. As Governor of California, he had been a proponent of tax cuts, and he cut the number of individuals in California's mental institutions.
But all that is forty years ago. Hating the government has become institutionalized on the right, along with a belief that all those in government service are enemies of the people. A Lord of the Flies type of view towards economics has been accepted. The ignored are angry An acceptance of politicians whose personal lives don't reflect their professed Christianity is now fully accepted, particularly by a public that claims to want to turn back the clock, but doesn't recall what the prior clock settings were.
Changing this requires an change on an existential level. There's no reason to believe that any current Republican, save perhaps for Christie and Romeny, could affect the start of it.
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