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Hippiekinkster -> RE: Republican Branding (8/30/2008 12:25:22 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: philosophy
quote:
ORIGINAL: cloudboy
On some level, we Americans just don't value being informed.
......why is this? Is it a legacy of isolationism?
No, I think it's an arifact of American Exceptionalism. If one is convinced that one lives in the greatest, freeest, most advanced democracy the world has ever seen, what reason is there to study other countries? Why should one care about other nations and their peoples? I see it on other boards; it distills to "fuck Europe" (Europe is invariably the target).
Now, I just had a notion occur to me. Americans tend to look down on other nations/peoples as less advanced, less free, more barbaric, etc., just as conservatives tend to look down on those who were born in this country outside the white corporate good-ole-boy system as being shiftless, lazy, stupid, and so on.
Most of the Progressives I know travel with the intent of actually learning about other people and cultures. I know I do. I took two years of German at the Goethe Institut before I went to Deutschland for my 50th. Now, there are more than a few conservatives who claim to have similar foreign travel, but when you dig a little deeper, they've spent their time on a military base and their knowledge of the local culture is "Ein Maß, bitte." I have yet to find a Republican who has gone to Indonesia to study Gamelan, or been to the jungle villages in Peru teaching. They just don't do that sort of thing.
I think that attitude leads to a particularly dangerous form of Provincialism. One where its adherents believe that not only the US is superior (I remember the TV station sign-off vids in the Sixties: always something militaristic, with a flag motif and so on, showing us all that, in case there was any doubt, we had a bunch of jets and shit to beat up on the Gawdless Commonsists), but that it was Manifest Destiny to export the Amerikkkan way of life to Viet Nam (one sign off vid that remains in my memory I saw late at night at an SDS communal house), Guatemala, South Afrika (uh-huh), and anywhere else that people got the idea that maybe, just maybe, the Amurkins didn't have all the answers.
Ike warned about this. He warned about the military-industrial complex. Nobody listened. And he was a Republican (nothing like today's Homo Republicanus, though)! And today, the Republican party is the political arm of the US Chamber of Commerce, the action arm of the Wall Street Journal, and the legislative guardians of inherited power and wealth.
There is no survival value in being informed. Become informed, and your neighbors turn on you (reminds me of a famous experiment wherein a chimpanzee was given LSD, then put back into the troop. After a very brief time, the entire troop was up in arms, not because of anything the chimp deliberately did, but because he blithely ignored all the social niceties of the troop. He became his own chimp, so to spaek, and was cast out for not confornming).
No, it's not a legacy of Isolationism. It's an active social process of convergence to the mean, "go along to get along", imitating one's "social betters", and all those other coping mechanisms that help Muffy and Biff get into the best schools, and get the best jobs, and meet the right people (Skull and Bones, anyone), and thus continue to perpetuate the status quo, rather than make any meaningful change.
Conservatives oppose Level Playing Fields, peri and post-natal nutrition programs, meaningful school reform, free post-secondary education, Affirmative Action, health care reform (neighborhood clinics that focus on prevention and adequate nutrition), and pretty much any other safety net/assisted self-improvement programs, not so much because they are philosphically opposed to them, but because they might lead to their positions of power being challenged.
Enough for now.
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