Driftglass pegs American Conservatives.

Want to see a truly accurate depiction of the modern American conservatives? Scary but accurate.

The whole thing is posted on Steve Gilliards News Blog, written by Driftglass. Here is part of it.

"Deeply, primarily terrified. Their whole psychological infrastructure is cobbled together out of half-baked conservative bumper-sticker ideology, gun lust, socially illiterate hatred of "welfare cheats" and other largely fictional or apocryphal lazy people (read: niggers and other swarthy folk) who want to leech off of them while they work harder and harder for less and less. Despite a lot of bluster about Freedom and Individuality they are, at heart, happiest when they are conforming to the wishes of the Strong Man; when they know exactly their place in the hierarchy.

Security and Enforced Orderliness is their idea Heaven and Doubt is their Hell, which is why they swarm like mayflies towards simple-minded sloganeering instead of actual, y'know, thinking - and why many of them fall madly in love with Fundamentalism. It's this anti-Faustian bargain where they get the perfect peace of mind that comes from absolute, swaggering certainty that they are completely right about every single thing. And thrown in at no extra charge, they get Paradise after they die, with the promise that they'll get to see my sorry ass screaming in agony in a lake of fire on Basic Cable for all eternity."

Steve Gilliard questions driftglass's belief that the conservatives are at all concerned about being wrong. I think driftglass has pegged them. They fear ever being wrong, but it is more important to them that they win over some perceived enemy than it is for them to be right or wrong. Victory over an enemy always proves they are right. as long as they win, they are perfect and beyond reproach.

As for being right? Their cobbled together "philosophy" is so riddled with inconsistencies and flaws that reasonable analysis will destroy it. They protect against this by depending on the statements of some "authority" rather than by personal analysis.

Theirs is a social movement, not an intellectual one. It consists largely of people who have to believe they are absolutely correct before they can act. They fear uncertainty as it can mean that they are wrong. So they choose "perfect" authorities and follow them blindly. This is most clearly seen in the Biblical Inerrantists, but the Fiscal Conservatives and the Libertarians do much the same thing. As long as they follow a perfect authority slavishly, they can never be accused of being wrong. The issue is to be emotionally right, not necessarily logically right.

But of course they can be accused of being wrong. So they choose authorities who explain that there are enemies out there who are attacking them. Those enemies are doing so because they are evil, not because they have performed a different analysis and are acting on it. Not only are those enemies evil, they choose to be evil. Those enemies include Communists, liberals, secular humanists, University Professors, and so on. Really it is anyone who disagrees with them.

As long as the chosen conservative "perfect leaders" have identified these critics as being enemies, their accusations can be ignored. The only actions a good conservative needs to take with these enemies is to destroy or neutralize them. Then the conservatives "win."

Do I think this applies to every conservative? No. But it is the set of assumptions used by the leaders to control the body of the movement. Then the fiscal conservatives use massive amounts of corporate money and donations from wealthy to tie the political organizations together and reward effective activists, while the social conservatives provide the energetic mobs to get out and perform the scut work required to get politicians elected. This ties those two different groups together, because each knows that without the other they have no power and no hope for power.

I haven't figured out exactly what the Libertarians get out of association with the fiscal and social conservatives. It may just be that they are also aware that without the others they have no hope of gaining any power.

Anyway that's my take on conservatives in America.