Right-Wing Media’s Vice Grip On The GOP Is Only Going To Get Tighter
More and more Republicans and conservatives concede that the GOP is facing an urgent crisis as the party teeters on a full-fledged crackup. Finding it increasingly difficult to field competitive presidential candidates, the GOP, after having handed over its identity to right-wing media voices for years, now struggles with how to move forward, and with how to repair the likely damage the Trump campaign will do to the party.
In other words, the party’s trying to figure out what to do when its public face resembles a rodeo clown like Sean Hannity, and when so many Republican voters live inside the right-wing, fact-free, Rush Limbaugh bubble that Trump so firmly embraced.
… But here’s what is unique about the GOP’s current crisis: Electorally, the party’s in desperate need of an overhaul. Parties on downswings have pulled off those kinds of rebranding efforts in the past. But the GOP has to try to remake itself while large and influential portions of the conservative media, including the conspiratorial “alt-right” media, fight the party at every step.
Fixing political parties is hard, arduous work that takes years of cooperative labor to pull off. Fixing political parties that are weighed down by an egomaniac-driven, multi-million dollar media industry that’s committed to spouting paranoid gobbledygook? That’s virtually impossible.
And that’s the bind the GOP now finds itself in. Even if it wanted to, the party simply cannot extricate itself from this poisonous parasite that has attached itself to the GOP’s vital organs.
Awe … too bad for Flush and Squawk.
Squawk Hannity rejected?
Bet that doesn’t sit well at the Blowhard News Network, not to mention in Orem, or Utah Valley University where St. Sean Of The Cross With Arrogant Smugness has a statue in the auditorium.
More than once I’ve heard the refrain from friends and family with whom I maintain a passing “relativity” that I just flat out read too much.
It’s a problem I’ve been stuck with most of my life … reading too much which is then followed up the equally destructive addiction of thinking too much about what I’ve been reading.
I’ve recently been given to more fully understand that the solution to all the problems in our country are essentially encountered in the simple (or was it simplistic?) minds of the simple (or was it simplistic?) followers of national conservative thinkers like Messrs Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly and other members of that broadcast think-tank fraternity.
The key is in reducing complex issues into powerful straight forward but brief clarifications.
For example, unfounded concerns about climate change, pollution and ozone layers has been reduced to the straight forward clearing up of any confusion with Limbaugh’s dismissal of my concerns as the “neurotic hand wringing of tree hugging ‘environmentalist whackos.’”
Can it be any clearer than that?
And how could I have ever forgotten those years in the 80’s when I too was a devout dittohead and when Rush dismissed female equality issues as mere notorious “feminazism?”
Is there not something irrationally appealing about living in a world dominated by black-white certitude; where such things as nuances have no impact? That’s the beauty and loveliness of simple (or simplistic?) life in Right Country/
There has to be security in that psychic foreclosure stuff.
But their certitude consigns them to what psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called the state of psychic foreclosure.
Foreclosed persons are easily attracted to the beguilingly simple, one-size-fits-all belief systems of powerful others that they adopt as their own so as to avoid the sometimes lonely rigors of personal searching.
The foreclosed are the ready disciples of demagogues in every age. – Psychologist Paul Ginetty
It really isn’t about logic or common sense.
It really isn’t “I just wannabe loved.”
It’s more of “I want to be singing in the same choir and on the same page as somebody who is simply (or simplistically) famous, influential and popular among my friends.”
It’s about an idea that no matter that I sacrifice my individuality and intellectual integrity so long as I am loved and respected by all my fellow sacrificers. We are they who willingly shout “Amen!” to the simple (simplistic?) profound declarations of the national blowhards – those talkers who willingly admit to never having read up on or pursued knowledgeable command of the topic they wish to deride.
It’s not about that kind of sacrifice … its about inclusion and a brothers-in-uninformed-arms intimacy with a voice on a tv screen or the radio.
As psychology professor Paul Ginetty wrote,
They get a chance to feel real smart when the master seems to agree with them, failing to see that it is actually they who are agreeing with him.
Yes, if I want to calm down and retire to a life of ignorant bliss I should repent, reconvert to ditto-headedness so that I too can enjoy a life of simplistic simple-mindedness.
… maybe even stake out a booth at the local Elk Snout Tavern where as a disciple I can spread the shallow gospel of simple arrogant ignorance
Curmudgeon at Work 