Get Happy!

First: The Minnesota left-leaning group blog New Patriot is undergoing an unprecedented surge in activity, managing (among the blog's ten writers) seven posts in four days!

Keep it up, guys! (*)

Luke Francl is back with a question: Why are conservatives so angry?

His post starts:

This one's for the conservatives in the audience [Berg looks around, scans horizon, then slowly raises hand]. Help me out.

Why are y'all so angry all the time?

That's simple. We're not.

As has been noted in the past year, studies have shown the Republicans tend to be happier, smarter, and have better sex lives than Democrats; hardly symptoms of repressed rage. If these be the wages of anger, then by all means knee me in the groin and call me a Fabian.

The claim is absurd. But it wasn't always.

There was a time when conservatives did seem angry. The latter years of the George H. W. Bush administration, and the first couple of years of Clinton's term, were kind of harrowing, if you were a conservative; between Bush's at-best lukewarm grasp of conservative principle and the national party's rush to the social center on many hot-button conservative issues (the sell-out on gun control in '94 was a key example), it was easy to feel as if the good times were over, as if Reagan was already forgotten. I, Mr. Chill himself, was angry; I left the GOP, and for five somewhat misbegotten years joined the Libertarian party.

It was the one - say again, one - time when conservatism came anywhere close to playing to its "angry white guy" stereotype. To some extent, conservatives had only themselves to blame, of course; hard-core ideological conservatism is no more adept at turning out voters than Liberarian purists are; the ideologues had gotten spoiled by eight years of Reagan (who was both a conservative and was capable of winning and governing). It was the nadir of post-Reagan conservatism, so far. And it ended after '96.

So Francl's not completely wrong - just nine years late.

After the Dole debacle, conservatives got serious. They took stock of the situation. And in the runup to 2000, the movement took a hot, steaming purgative and rid itself of a foaming pile of anger, the Buchanan "wing" of the party. The remaining, less ideologically-simon-pure but more pragmatic movement won the election in 2000, 2002, and this past November.

And it's never been about anger to those people, not that I've seen (and I have seen). It's about having a mission, and accomplishing it.

Back to Francl's question:

If it's not one thing, it's another...you're mad at Nick Coleman, the "MSM", labor unions, DemoRATS, civil rights activists, France, socialists (all 12 of them)...

Francl is using a form of logic most often associated with "everyone's first spouse"; there's another word for it. We'll get to it in a bit.

Because as I said, we're not angry. I was more involved in this past election and with conservatism in general than at any time in my life, via the blog, the show, and the campaign. And the anger, compared to ten years ago, was infinitesimal. There was truly motivation; it was more the "we got a big job to do" variety than the snarling anger that Francl seems to conjure. And yes, we bloggers staked out our turf, calling out the likes of Coleman and the media for their disingenuity, sloppiness and bias with alacrity; we called "thuggery" when union members started busting GOPers heads, we noted (correctly) that France has never actually been a US ally and that they were on the take from Hussein...in short, we called it as we saw it, and backed ourselves up with the facts (try it!). (By the way - unlike, I suspect, most of the NewPat staff, I'm a former union member; we'll return to this thought in a bit, too).

Anger, no. The conservatives I met - and I met a helluvva lot - were less "Thelma and Louise" and more "Blues Brothers". We were on a Mission from God, delivered with a wink and a smile. (Note to text-parsing conspiracists: Merry Christmas).

But oy, did we ever run into it. The bottled vitriol of Democratic Underground, the snarling fulminations dressed as cool snarkiness of the big leftybloggers, the thuggy "union" guys patrolling the State Fair, the condescension, the post-election paranoid fantasies of secession and the pseudo-intellectual autoeroticism of the endless surveys that "proved" that blue states were smarter, better, and yet more put-upon than the red states...

...in short, anger. To be polite.

So back to Francl; I suggest he's engaging in that timeless emotional defense of the non-lead dog, "Projection"; taking the trait in your own psyche that most scares or shames you, and pasting it onto a scapegoat.

It's just a theory, I'm going to run with it for a bit.

What's your issue? You just won a tight election that validated your world view, you control all three branches of government, made gay marriage illegal in a dozen states [several of them "blue", by the way - they keep forgetting that], you've got this awesome war against evil, or Islamofascism, or whatever, that's going really well. And hell, most of you are rich (I'm looking at the Powerline guys, here.).

Y'know, liberal bloggers in general, and the NewPats in particular, seem to operate with this huge chip on their shoulders about relative wealth. This keeps coming up whenever they talk about us, and especially about Powerline.

Most of us are rich? Hm. I'm a single parent who works very hard to stay in the middle class. Twelve years ago, my family and I were living on government cheese, I was donating plasma to buy diapers, fought off eviction by the skin of our teeth, and I spent a year learning to spot unmarked police cars because I couldn't afford either license tabs or car insurance, yet still had to drive to work. Then in '03, I spent ten months scrambling for change under bus seats to keep a roof over my kids' heads. I've seen no evidence that any of the New Patriot bloggers have ever lacked wealth to the extent I did. And yet I was a Republican.

Cue the trite retorts!

I think y'all should chill out. Maybe watch some movies, indoctrinate your kids about the evils of collective bargaining, take a vacation. Maybe look into some anti-anxiety medication (your doctor can help you out with that one).

But as the studies - and my own observations - have shown, we're not the ones that need it. We're happier, healthier, smarter, we get more and better bootay, and we won. We, as a group, are chilling just fine.

Projection? You be the judge.

(*) Kid=must!

UPDATE: The commenter is correct: "Projection", not "Transference", was the term I was looking for. I changed it in the post, which is otherwise unchanged.

Posted by Mitch at January 14, 2005 06:44 PM | TrackBack