Conservatives Are Afraid Of People Speaking Other Languages

1969- somehow we wound up as guests at a wedding, somewhere in Morocco. I'm the nerd with the big stoned smile and the embroidery on my pants cuffs

So there I was-- 1969, Hippie Trail, headed for India in my VW van. We were in eastern Turkey getting read to cross the border into Iran the next day. We were: me, the only American on board, a French guy, two Danes and a German. There was another van going in the other direction parked with us, driven by an Australian and he had another Aussie with him as well as a couple of Japanese kids, a Flemish-speaking Belgian and a guy from Chile. Getting ready for crossing a border meant smoking up all the dope everyone had; no dope allowed at border crossings. So we sat around getting stoned and exchanging stories about what was ahead and behind.

I was really high when I suddenly realized how lucky I was. The Danish girl and the Japanese girl were having a side conversation near me and it was in English. Everyone was talking English. That was the language of the road. It was the common language of travelers. I spent a couple of years in Asia and I could get along with English almost everywhere. In Afghanistan I wound up way off the beaten path in a tiny "village" (2 compounds) in the Hindu Kush. No one spoke English. They didn't even speak Farsi (Persian) or Dari (the local Afghan version of Farsi). No one had ever experienced electricity or had heard of the United States. Since I was on horseback with a broken ankle and snowed in for the winter, I was forced to learn Pashtun. But... otherwise, English worked everywhere.

A few years later I was working at the Kosmos, Amsterdam's mediation center. It was a city-subsidized international youth center and there were people from all over the world, as staff and as clients. But English was the "official" language of the Kosmos. Many of the Dutch staffers were not happy about that, bit everyone knew that's the way it had to be. Outside of work they refused to respond to English and would only speak Dutch. These were my closest friends. They forced me to learn Dutch. The only one who would talk English with me was Evelyne, a French-Dutch artist, but she preferred Dutch too. It was good for me, although... right around the time Nixon was being impeached I woke up one morning and realized I had been dreaming in Dutch, not English. I didn't like that. I started thinking about moving back to the U.S. at that point, which I eventually did.

But while I was living overseas I realized that the only people uncomfortable with hearing foreign languages were Americans. Canadians weren't. Nor were Brits or Aussies or South Africans. Just Americans. When you're stoned you get sensitive to that kind of thing and can recognize it. I came to understand that Americans are so unused to hearing foreign languages that they-- or more accurately some of them-- get paranoid and assume that the people speaking another language are saying something nasty about them-- anything from, "Oh, what a asshole" to "Let's cut him up in a thousand pieces and dump the pieces all over Herat in a pattern."

You sometimes can detect that kind of paranoia here in the states when people are speaking Spanish. Some people just bristle. According to Pew Research, those people are conservatives. That's who who gets up tight and paranoid about a foreign language. I knew that instinctively but it was interesting to see it as part of their study.

About three-in-ten Americans say it would bother them to hear people speak a language other than English in public

Most Americans (70%) say they would not be particularly bothered if they heard people speak a language other than English in a public place, including 47% who say they would not be bothered at all. Still, a sizable share (29%) says this would bother them at least some.

Roughly a third of whites (34%) and about a quarter of blacks (24%) and Asians (24%) say they would be bothered if they heard people speak a language other than English in public; a smaller share of Hispanics (14%) say the same. About two-thirds of Hispanics (68%) say this wouldn’t bother them at all, compared with half or fewer whites (41%), blacks (48%) and Asians (50%). Foreign-born Hispanics are more likely than those born in the U.S. to say they would not be bothered at all if they heard someone speak a language other than English in public (76% vs. 61%).

Among whites, reactions vary considerably by age, education and political orientation. Younger whites and those with a bachelor’s degree or more education are less likely than their older and less educated counterparts to say they would be bothered by hearing a language other than English in a public place.

Views are even more divided along partisan lines. About six-in-ten white Democrats (58%)-- vs. 26% of white Republicans-- say this wouldn’t bother them at all.

The part of this that I keep mulling over is that 47% of white Republicans said it would bother them "some" or "a lot" to "hear people speak a language other than English in a public place." Interestingly Pew found that only 18% of white Democrats would be bothered. What does that tell you about the people attracted to the two parties?

What Drove The Republican Party Base Insane? (Spoiler: It Was More Than Just Fox And Hate Talk Radio)

This morning's first post-- based primarily on the work of Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson conflating today's off-the-rails Republican extremists with the post Civil War secessionist Democratic extremists of 1879-- is one of the most chilling ever at this blog. If you missed it, I heartily recommend you go back and read it right now. It will certainly put into context the GOP's hallucinatory dogma of paranoia and disorientation, something that goes beyond the silly Trump (and Carson) phenomena just to the heart of the neo-fascist train the Republican Party is about to unleash in the person of Ted Cruz, likely the real reason Reince Priebus was moaning last week that the party he presides over is "cooked" as a national party.

In a revelatory post at Salon Sunday Chauncey DeVega-- drawing brilliantly on the work of German-born political philosopher Leo Strauss (1877-1973), who was the dude, by the way, who laid the ground for Godwin's Law in 1951 with his Reductio ad Hitlerum-- does a deep dive about what's become of the GOP's "conservative" grounding and ability to handle actual analytic thinking. Today "the power and appeal of the Republican Party," he writes, "lies in how its consultants and media accomplices have created a highly entertaining and confusing type of absurdist political theater. While wealth and income inequality are central to America’s political polarization and dysfunction, the alternate reality cultivated by political leaders and right-wing media has a heavy impact on a political culture where broken politics is not just an aberration or outlier, but rather the norm." This is about to get very scary.

Movement conservatism is compelling for so many people because of its visceral emotional appeal, and how the mindsets of conservative authoritarians are oriented toward accepting a Manichaean, binary, fear-centered, and dominance-oriented perspective of the world.

Moreover, movement conservatism is obsessed with protecting “real America.” This functions both as salvation and as something at risk by “liberals,” “progressives,” people of color, immigrants, gays, or whatever other group is viewed as a threat to the status quo of the “good old days.” Alas, this “real America” never truly existed.

Nevertheless, this illusory world must be protected at all costs because it is central to the “politics of disorientation,” a vaudevillian and spectacular political belief system that today’s conservatism uses to make sense of the world.

The politics of disorientation has several elements:

Apocalypticism: Historian Richard Hofstadter, most famously in his seminal work The Paranoid Style in American Politics, noted how conservatives, even in the 1950s and 1960s, were creating a cult-like political system that prized orthodoxy over critical thought, alternative evidence, or empirical reality. This is the shadow under which the politics of disorientation operates for movement conservatives. On this point, historian Robert Toplin explains at the History News Network how:

Individuals who seek a broader understanding of the present political standoff in Washington may find Hofstadter’s judgments thought-provoking.

Richard Hofstadter recognized that evangelical leaders were playing a significant role in right-wing movements of his time, but he noticed that a “fundamentalist” style of mind was not confined to matters of religious doctrine. It affected opinions about secular affairs, especially political battles. Hofstadter associated that mentality with a “Manichean and apocalyptic” mode of thought. He noticed that right-wing spokesmen applied the methods and messages of evangelical revivalists to U.S. politics. Agitated partisans on the right talked about epic clashes between good and evil, and they recommended extraordinary measures to resist liberalism. The American way of life was at stake, they argued. Compromise was unsatisfactory; the situation required militancy. Nothing but complete victory would do.

Spectacle: The culture of illusion and distraction, wherein entertainment is a stand-in for full and authentic human experiences, enables the Reality TV-esque popularity of demagogues like Donald Trump, and the litany of ridiculous policy positions-- again divorced from empirical fact or reality-- offered by the leading Republican candidates. Here, Fox News, a “news” operation that has made right-wing talking points interchangeable with “facts,” represents the culture of illusion in full operation. That Fox News is America’s highest rated “news station” and actually has the most ignorant and uninformed viewership of any major news media outlet, signals to how entertainment is confused with substance in the culture of illusion and distraction. The masses are asses in such a system, not because such behavior is “natural,” but because such behavior is normalized and encouraged.

The right-wing media is one of the most effective propaganda operations in modern history.

Lies and Deception: The Right-wing media, the elites in the Republican Party, and its various interest groups, are engaged in a systematic campaign of deception toward the American people. This is philosopher Leo Strauss’s theories on truth and leadership in action.

As explained by political writer Jim Lobe:

…Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical-- divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right-- the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”

This dichotomy requires “perpetual deception” between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,”The people are told what they need to know and no more.” While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy, according to Drury, author of Leo Strauss and the American Right (St. Martin’s 1999).

Movement conservatives, and Republican voters, en masse, are utterly confused about the nature of reality, and respond with rage and anger when confronted by facts-- a version of the Dunning-Krueger effect, in which where people are ignorant but do not have the expertise or awareness even to know just how ignorant they are-- because they have been systematically misled.

A hallucinatory ideology. This is a dangerous system of belief wherein people are unmoored from reality and embrace distorted views of the world and the people around them, often driven by stereotypes or other types of hatred, which then works to legitimate destructive behavior.

Authoritarian political attitudes are on the increase in the United States. This trend is especially prominent among conservatives. Authoritarianism, with its intolerance, appeals to violence, and eliminationist rhetoric about “liberals,” “progressives,” and any type of “Other,” are fixtures and habits of the right-wing media and conservative political elites.

Hallucinatory ideology helps to create the intractability and hostility to political compromise and good governance that form the brand name of conservatism and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama.

Thus we find ourselves. And the question-- one that has lingered over American politics since the election of a Black and Democratic president drove movement conservatives to mouth-frothing derangement in 2008 and 2012-- still remains: Will normal politics on display in last week’s Democratic debate be able to defeat the madness and insanity of the Republican Party in November of 2016?

Or will a Republican win the White House, not because they are serious people with serious thoughts about how best to serve the Common Good, but rather because they are demagogues, more captivating than their Democratic rivals? The latter is a distinct possibility, as the politics of disorientation are a difficult foe for the rational and the reasonable to battle and overcome.

Late today, news broke from Denver that the former Republican president, George W. Bush detests the junior senator from his state, Ted Cruz, a neo-fascist who is also a Republican. Cruz worked for Bush when he was president but that didn't stop him from telling a roomful of rich Jeb donors yesterday that "I just don't like the guy."

Bush took a harsh view of Cruz’s apparent alliance with Trump, who stood with the senator at a Capitol Hill rally last month in opposition to the Iran deal. While Trump, the current GOP poll leaders, has attacked most of his competitors in the 2016 field, he has avoided criticizing Cruz.

One donor, paraphrasing the former president’s comment in response to a broad question about how he viewed the primary race and the other Republican candidates, said: "He said he found it ‘opportunistic’ that Cruz was sucking up to Trump and just expecting all of his support to come to him in the end," that donor added.

George W. Bush is well acquainted with his home-state senator, who served as a domestic policy adviser on his 2000 campaign before rising to national prominence by distancing himself from-- and often going out of his way to antagonize-- the GOP establishment. In his book published earlier this year, Cruz ripped Bush’s record, criticizing elements of his foreign policy and faulting the administration for enabling "bigger government and excessive spending and new entitlements."

While Jeb Bush’s campaign is spending far more time of late pushing out information that contrasts favorably with Rubio, his oldest brother seemed to see Cruz as the biggest threat in the end. According to several donors, the former president said not to doubt Cruz’s strength.

"He said he thought Cruz was going to be a pretty formidable candidate against Jeb, especially in Texas and across the South," a donor said.

...Bush also cast Cruz’s candidacy as an exercise in personal gain, not service. "He sort of looks at this like Cruz is doing it all for his own personal gain, and that’s juxtaposed against a family that’s been all about public service and doing it for the right reasons," a donor said. "He's frustrated to have watched Cruz basically hijack the Republican Party of Texas and the Republican Party in Washington."

It well may come down to a battle between GOP over-confidence and wretched, self-defeating Democratic Party leadership, but, unless Bernie Sanders figures out a way to overcome the Clinton/Wall Street money machine, it will certainly come down to another nauseating lesser-of-two-evils election that will change nothing for the country.

GOP Anarchists Put Off Their Next Government Shutdown 'Til Just Before Christmas-- Very Sick People

Yesterday the Senate-- and then the House-- voted to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government open at least until December 11. Every Democrat in the Senate and every Democrat in the House voted yes, of course. And in the Senate, where it passed 78-20, all but 20 extreme right nihilist Republicans and infantile anarchist Republicans voted in favor, despite Ted Cruz's lament about shutting the whole thing down. These were the 20 who voted to shut the government down:

• Roy Blunt (R-MO)
• John Boozman (R-AR)
• Richard Burr (R-MC)
• Dan Coats (R-IN)
• Tom Cotton (R-AR)
• Mike Crapo (R-ID)
• Ted Cruz (R-TX)
• Dean Heller (R-NV)
• James Inhofe (R-OK)
• James Lankford (R-OK)
• Mike Lee (R-UT)
• Jerry Moran (R-KS)
• Rand Paul (R-KY)
• James Risch (R-ID)
• Ben Sasse (R-NE)
• Tim Scott (R-SC)
• Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (KKK-AL)
• Richard Shelby (R-AL)
• Pat Toomey (R-PA)
• David Vitter (R-LA)

As Alan Grayson pointed out earlier this week, the last time the Republicans forced the government to stop doing business, "Standard & Poor’s estimated that the 16-day federal shutdown in 2013 cost us $24 billion, and reduced fourth quarter 2013 Gross National Product growth by about 0.6%." This time most Senate Republicans were feeling more like responsible adults. Alas, not so in the House, where the rot has spread to the majority of the GOP. The CR passed 277-151 because Boehner made a deal with Pelosi and she had every single Democrat, all 186 of them, on board. Only 91 Republicans voted yes; 151 Republicans voted to shut down the government, and not just the hyper-partisan extremists like Steve King, Louie Gohmert, Daniel Webster, Jim Jordan, Jody Hice, Ted Yoho, Tim Huelskamp and Glenn Grothman, but also conservatives who try-- or sometimes try (usually around election time)-- to pass themselves off as either moderate or-- if that is too far-fetched-- vaguely mainstream.

Meanwhile, Rand Paul, who-- like Cruz-- voted to shut down the government yesterday, went on the attack against Cruz. He was on Fox News Radio telling listeners that Cruz "is pretty much done for and stifled, and it’s really because of personal relationships, or lack of personal relationships, and it is a problem."

Rand Paul on Tuesday had a blunt message for his presidential rival and fellow Republican senator Ted Cruz: You're a hack.

In no uncertain terms, Paul called out Cruz for trying-- and failing-- to disrupt GOP leadership's efforts to fund the government without attacking Planned Parenthood, as well as past name-calling from the Texas senator.

"Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership and call them names which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the Senate, and as a consequence he can’t get anything done legislatively," Paul said, referring to a spat in July when Cruz called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar.

"I approach things a little different, I am still just as hardcore in saying what we are doing is wrong, I just chose not to call people liars on the Senate floor and it’s just a matter of different perspectives on how best to get to the end result."

6-word editorial

I guess New Hampshire teabagger Frank Guinta forgot he's in a tough race everyone thinks he's going to lose. His Democratic challenger, Carol Shea-Porter, feels most voters in New Hampshire were sickened by Guinta's reckless behavior in voting for the shutdown yesterday. She told us:

The Associated Press was clearly talking about Frank Guinta when it reported that "approval of such stopgap measures used to be routine, but debate this year was delayed by tea party lawmakers." Frank Guinta was willing to hurt our country and its citizens by shutting down the federal government because he didn't want Planned Parenthood to be funded. The man who has been pretending to be a moderate because he thought the Tea Party was fading just remembered that he really is a right-wing extremist after all. Frank Guinta, meet Frank Guinta, the extremist who has said repeatedly that a woman is not even entitled to an abortion to save her life.

Similar situation with Rod Blum in northeast Iowa. Blum represents a blue-leaning district-- which includes Dubuque, Cedar Rapids and Waterloo-- and next year will have to face former state House Speaker Pat Murphy, a stalwart progressive, but voted to shut the government down anyway. Murphy told us today:

It's shameful that Congressman Blum is acting like a partisan zealot wanting to shut down the government over denying basic healthcare services to women in this country. Furthermore, another program, food stamps, would have been halted which would have brought more suffering to low-income women and children. This is unexplainable and indefensible... Let’s get this guy out of office.

But the person who was really scratching his head today was Joe Sestak, who wants to take on Pat Toomey for the state's Senate seat next year. Pennsylvania isn't Alabama, and people were stunned yesterday when Toomey voted with the radicals and against the mainstream of his own conservative party to shut down the government. Tomey sent Pennsylvania voters a written statement:

A day after telling the New York Times that, "It’s important for our party to demonstrate that we have the competence to govern," Pat Toomey has again voted to shut down the federal government, joining with his Tea Party partners Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

An overwhelmingly bipartisan majority of 78 Democrat, Republican and Independent Senators voted to keep the federal government running. Not Pat Toomey. When Toomey walked off the stage of his re-election announcement two weeks ago, reporters asked him whether he would be voting to shut down the government. Attempting to sound moderate, Toomey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that, "I don’t think it’s a good idea to shut down the government."

That’s what Toomey said in Pennsylvania, but what he does in Washington, D.C., is vote to shut down the government.

Even Mitch McConnell supported the continuing resolution saying, "it will keep the government open through the fall and funded at the bipartisan level already agreed to by both parties as we work on the way forward."

Yet, Toomey joined the fringe.

Moderate Republicans like Kelly Ayotte have become frustrated with Toomey’s fringe wing of the party’s attempts to shut down the government to defund Planned Parenthood tweeting, "[i]t's time to quit the games. I came here to solve problems & that means we need to address this issue."

Unfortunately, this is nothing new from Toomey. In 2013, he was part of a small group of 19 fringe Senators who voted to shut down the government because the continuing resolution didn’t defund the Affordable Care Act.

That shutdown "meant 6.6 million days of lost work, $2 billion in back pay for 850,000 federal employees who did no work and 120,000 private-sector jobs gone," as reported by the Washington Post.

Time and again, Toomey has shown that he is willing to put his hyperpartisan ideology over the basic responsibility of funding the government-- even as so many of his Republican colleagues join with Democrats in keeping the government open.

Maybe this crackpottery works in GOP circles is because Republican voters have been driven insane by Hate Talk Radio and Fox and are now all paranoid and out of their minds. Think I'm kidding? Chris Cillizza at this morning's Washington Post: "Half of the country believes that the federal government 'poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.' HALF! The party breakdown is even more remarkable. Two-thirds (65 percent) of self-identified Republicans believe their government poses an immediate threat to their rights and freedoms... That is a startling number-- and speaks not only to the massive disgust and disenchantment among Republicans toward the government, but also the urgency of the perceived threat that it poses. The idea of the government swooping in to restrict your rights is not an abstract discussion for many people-- especially those who identify as Republicans. It is a real and present danger."