Hateful Idiots Lacking Self Awareness: The Minutemen

Greg points out the stupidity:

The infamous Minuteman group has dissolved itself. Why? Because it sent out a call for wackos with big guns, and then was alarmed at all the wackos with big guns who responded.

On March 16, Mercer sent out an e-mail urging members to come to the border “locked, loaded and ready” and urged people to bring “long arms.” She proposed changing the group’s rules to allow members to track illegal immigrants and drug smugglers instead of just reporting the activity to the Border Patrol.

“We will forcefully engage, detain, and defend our lives and country from the criminals who trample over our culture and laws,” she wrote in the March 16 e-mail.

Mercer said she received a more feverish response than she expected — 350 personal e-mails she said — and decided the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps couldn’t shoulder the responsibility and liability of what could occur, she said.

“People are ready to come lock and loaded and that’s not what we are all about,” Mercer said. “It only takes one bad apple to destroy everything we’ve done for the last eight years.”

With luck, this is a sign of some semblance of change since 2005, when the group formed amidst a frenzy of xenophobia. Even an extremist group begins to realize how extremist it is, albeit in a bizarrely contradictory fashion.

The only thing I'd add here is that this is just another example of what can only be either A) the right-wing's hypocrisy, or B) complete lack of self-awareness. The fact that they're calling people out "locked and loaded" and then shocked when people show up "locked and loaded" is about as sensible as a man getting $1300 from the government in disability checks railing against health-care as a "government handout." I used to be absolutely confident it was item "A," and I think with politicians it still may be, but item "B" seems increasingly possible when dealing with "real 'Mericans." The fact that the conservative movement has not been invested in deep thinking or philosophical approaches to conservatism in the way that somebody like a William Buckley or an Irving kristol seems to increasingly leading to the base being the party of un-think (and to be clear, I think both men's philosophies were pretty terrible from an ideological standpoint, but nonetheless, they thought through those positions and seemed a bit more consistent compared to your performance-art dimbulbs like Bill Kristol). Certainly, that lack of self-awareness doesn't strip many of these people of their sheer hypocrisy, but it's telling of a movement that for years has been waging war against education by vilifying universities as hotbeds of "liberal" thinking and dumbing down textbooks for political reasons also seems unable to realize just how stupid they sound when they express amazement at the outcome of their violent rhetoric or the total disconnect between what they expect for themselves and what they think others should have. The minutemen, like Vanderboegh, are symptoms of what the conservative base is becoming, and the saddest part is, they will probably continue to encourage violence and hatred through their language and then remain mystified when somebody actually acts on their words.

A Rare Admirable Quality in Ronald Reagan?

I'm going to write words I never thought I'd write or say: it may not be such a terrible to look to Ronald Reagan on a key issue in the United States for the last several years:

Reagan was far to the left of the 2010 Republican Party on issues such as torture. The convention that he signed in 1988 holds that there is no circumstance of any kind that permits torture, which certainly would include the 9/11 aftermath and related anti-terror efforts today.

But it goes even deeper than that. As I noted in an early 2010 blog post: “Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president, he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan called retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed “itself a terrorist act.” And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”

To be clear, I absolutely do not think Reagan was a saint, nor does Will Bunch, who also points out that the "'Reagan Doctrine' in Central America, leaving the fight to anti-Communist thugs and death squads that the then-president called “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” is arguably the gravest moral failing of his tenure." I couldn't agree more.

But that doesn't take away from the rather stark stance Reagan took against torture, nor does it detract from the obviously-opposite stance of current torture-apologists who claim to look to Reagan as their guiding light. Again, this is in no way an apology for Reagan, and I think his policies were overwhelmingly terrible and negative on both the U.S. and the world. That said, the fact that he was so strongly anti-torture does matter, and just serves as another reminder of how far the right has gone in the last 30 years, as well as how the vision of Reagan that today's right props up as its paragon does not always reflect the Reagan who was actually president.

The connection between reason, information, and political ideology

The Washington Post has a story about a recent experiment conducted by two political scientists:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

(You can read some more commentary about this article at Mother Jones, and find a link to the study)

This study adds to another recent finding in Larry Bartels' new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton University Press, 2008). Among the many interesting findings in Bartels' new book, he found using survey data that perceptions of growing economic inequality in the United States over the last twenty years were far different among liberals and conservatives. Not particularly surprising on the face of it, but he also found that political information had a substantially different effect among liberals and conservatives. The income gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. has increased over the last twenty years, this isn't a debatable fact. But, Bartels found that among liberals, they were increasingly likely to recognize increasing economic inequality as they became more politically informed. Among the least informed liberals involved in the survey, about 70% recognized that inequality had increased, compared to 80% of the least informed conservatives. Among the most informed liberals, about 95% recognized that income inequality had increased, compared to about 60% of the most informed conservatives.

Am I really surprised by these findings? Not particularly. But it is still pretty disheartening that the likelihood of rational debate and reasonable compromise between liberals and conservatives, especially at the elite level, is pretty unlikely given that factual evidence has no impact on the most die-hard conservatives. If you combine these findings with other research that demonstrates ideological polarization between liberals and conservatives (or Democrats and Republicans) has also increased since the 1980s, especially at the elite level, the implications for the quality of public debate and public policy in this country are downright depressing.