Appealing to the negative base emotions
…is pretty easy to do. I’ve been thinking along those lines and this Krugman editorial (05Sept08, NYTimes) does parallel that idea.
There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the “misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.
And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier. Humiliation will do that.
I guess it’s the Republican reptile brain strategy and it does work grotesquely well. It always takes a lot more effort to think charitably (to be “godly”, not to put to fine a point on it) than to be self-appeasingly snotty and hatefully tribal.
I will guess that my experience in watching Obama’s acceptance speech — at one point thinking, “please, give me a call to volunteer, to help my fellow citizens; do what I wanted Bush to do after 9-11″ — is in stark contrast to the self-congratulatory contempt for others that the Palin and McCain speeches inspired.
But like I said, it’s always the easier path.
