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TPDS

TPDS? Yes. Tea Party Derangement Syndrome.

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education published a short, trenchant analysis of it by Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, and a perfect if unintentional example of it by Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin.

When Wood writes of the disdain of sneering academics for the dumbness and derangement of the hoi polloi, he could have been (but wasn?t) describing Robin?s almost frothing attempt to explain ?Why Conservatives Love War? in the same issue. Not some conservatives, all conservatives. Not just now but since time out of mind.

Corey begins his discussion of conservative depravity with a nod to Theodor Adorno?s now 60 year old The Authoritarian Personality and a popularizing riff on it in a 1955 essay by Richard Hofstadter, ?The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,? which described the pseudo-conservative as

no conservative at all. Prone to ?violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness,? he loves war and longs for bedlam in the streets. He has ?little in common,? in Hofstadter?s words, ?with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism.?

Moving on to Andrew Sullivan, a popularizer of Hofstadter?s popularizing, Corey accepts the description but doesn?t believe in the distinction between pseudo-conservatives and true conservatives.

Musing on those passages last June, Andrew Sullivan wrote on his blog, ?It all sounds weirdly familiar, doesn?t it?? He was talking about the predatory revanchism that has stalked the Republican Party since 9/11 and now consumes it. ?The Bush-Cheney presidency,? wrote Sullivan, was ?the perfect pseudo-conservative administration.? The White House and its neoconservative enablers celebrated war and torture, shredded the Constitution, and bankrupted the nation. ?Throughout all this,? Sullivan pointed out, ?the Tea Partiers supported them.? Merely the latest in a long line of pseudo-conservatives, the Tea Party backer is ?the opposite of a natural conservative at peace with the world as it is.?

It?s hard to disagree with Sullivan?s characterization of the American right. But he?like Hofstadter and Adorno before him?is wrong about its lack of conservative credentials. Today?s winger, like yesterday?s, is not a pseudo-conservative; he?s the real deal.

Actually, it?s hard to disagree with Sullivan only for those suffering from TPDS.

Full post as published by Discriminations on October 25, 2010 (boomark / email).