At one point, when I was living in an overwhelmingly Republican area (there were often no Democrats on the ballot for many of the offices), there was a scandal, and the community was outraged, and a public official was removed from office. There was another event around the same time that the media tried to make a scandal, but the community (and my neighbors) treated it as a trivial event that happens because people are people. In both scandals, as far as I can tell, everyone involved was Republican, so this wasn’t a question of partisan irrationality.
Here were the two issues. One: there was a plan for a new events center, and someone connected to the board (or perhaps even on the board) bought, in one of those complicated short-term ownership agreements, land that insider information let them know was going to be bought by for that center, and made a killing. There were articles in the local paper about how dodgy all this was.
Two: there was a sheriff had too much to drink at a wedding, and so walked home. On the way, he stopped to piss by the side of the road. He was arrested (that’s a sex crime in Texas).
It seemed to me that the self-dealing was a bigger deal than pissing in public. Pissing on the side of the road hurts literally no one. The self-dealing is corruption at its most obvious. My die-hard Republican neighbors had no opinion about the events center issue, dismissing it as “politics as usual,” but they were outraged about the sheriff.
And that’s when I understood how some people think about political decisions and corruption. They are so “anti-government” that they think it’s great if someone profits off government decisions–because profit is good.
My neighbors claimed that they were concerned with fiscal responsibility in government, but they must have known that the land deal meant that the county paid a lot more money for that land than it would have if there hadn’t been that inside deal. What they valued more than fiscal responsibility was somebody getting money out of the government. What they saw was someone using their position of power to maximize their personal profit, and that is what they valued–that’s what they thought power was for.
The government corruption generated profit. And my neighbors admired anyone who generated profit. And they didn’t admire someone who pissed in public. (The sheriff was also accused of sexual harassment, but that wasn’t something that outraged my neighbors.)
I’ve seen this a lot in people who describe themselves as “conservative.”[1] They are outraged about government bloat except when an individual profits tremendously through grift, graft, and self-dealing. As I said, that’s what they think power is for–to help yourself and your friends and hurt your enemies. And that’s one reason that so many people openly admire that Trump is using the government as his personal checking account.
The (conservative) author Jonathan Haidt has said that people who self-identify as conservative value loyalty to their ingroup whereas people who self-identify as liberal don’t. Haidt tries to make that valuing loyalty an admirable and simultaneously morally neutral quality, but it is neither.
It isn’t that my neighbors valued loyalty as a principle (in which case they would admire loyalty in Democrats); it’s that they value loyalty to their group. Had the people involved in that shady land deal been Democrats, my neighbors would have been outraged.
The GOP outrage machine (one of these days I’ll post about various other outrage machines) has for some time been engaged in a logically vexed anti-government demagoguery in which “government” is liberal.[2] They have also been promoting political success as nothing more than “stigginit to the liberals” and upsetting media. Once you’re drinking that demagogic Flavoraid, then there is no such thing as Republicans grifting the taxpayers.[3]
Republicans should care that Trump is grifting the government. But they don’t really care about fiscal responsibility; that’s just a phrase to make them feel better about their own corruption. The government does have bloat (every big institution does) and the government doesn’t do things in the way that makes the most sense to me (no big institution does). As I said in another (much too long) post, big institutions make bad decisions. But they also make decisions that aren’t bad–they’re the best decisions within the various constraints, or good enough decisions within the constraints. If we spend our lives outraged that the university, or city, or government isn’t enacting the policies we believe to be right, then we’re spending our lives in the pleasurable orgy of outrage. We aren’t doing good political work. Knee-jerk anti-government outrage enables the kind of grifting my neighbors admired.
[1] They aren’t conservative. They’re Randian neo-liberals.
[2] By its very nature, government is always conservative, but that’s a different post. And the GOP outrage machine isn’t about conservatism–Trump isn’t conservative–but about supporting whatever the political agenda of the GOP candidate for President happens to be at this moment.
[3] It isn’t just conservatives who have an irrational and knee-jerk hostility to the government. But, regardless of the voting pattern of the person engaged in trashing government, that position helps neo-conservative/neoliberals dismantle necessary services.
Brilliant.