Republican Psychology

Lots of things have been written about the Republican Brain. I’ve probably written a fair percentage of them myself. Do we need another overview of Republican psychology? Yes, because it has suddenly become the dominant, powerful psychology of the United States. It is now the face we show to the world. Not everyone who identifies as a Republican shares these features, but the powerful ones do. To the powerful Republicans who are now in control, the moderate Republicans are as irrelevant as Democrats.

Here are some of the characteristics that you find in almost all conservative Republicans:

• First, they must believe themselves to be uniquely right in the eyes of God. They cannot believe that there might be more than one right approach. Not only are they right; they are the only ones who are right.
• Second, they must find people to accuse of doing the things they declare to be sinful. Nowadays they are finding lots of people like that: Democrats, Muslims, immigrants, Native Americans.
• Third, they must make their accusations loud and public. The recent Las Vegas shooting was carried out by a 64-year-old man, whose motives remain unclear at the time I post this essay, but right-wing news outlets quickly said that a Muslim extremist had done it. The right-wing fake news was the story that caught the attention of French online media. For good reason, the French think Americans are by and large crazy, though they are willing to make individual exceptions to this rule of thumb. At least my French relatives make an exception for my family.
• Fourth, they have a psychological requirement to be hypocrites, to then do the things they accuse others of doing. One example, nearly trivial but illustrative: In his campaign tweets, Trump accused Obama 38 times of taking time off to go golfing. He promised to not do this, “I’ll be too busy working for you.” But he took golfing vacations (and other vacations at immense taxpayer expense) six times in his first thirty days. Of course, Trump like Gingrich was famous for serial marriages, each starting with an affair while still married to a previous wife. Conservatives condemn this but then must either do it or utterly approve and worship leaders who do. This is an essential step in closing the circle.
• Fifth, they accuse Democrats of being “bleeding hearts,” and they just assume that Democrats will not stand by and let people starve or die of disease. Therefore, the Republicans who run the federal and many state governments will stand by and let Democrats pay for food and health care for the poor out of private donations. This starts a downward spiral in which altruistic Democrats get weaker and poorer as Republicans get richer and stronger.
• Finally, there is no problem in the world, certainly in the country, that cannot be solved by just letting people have as many guns as possible, without any background checks. While it is just as legal for a Democrat to buy an assault weapon as for a Republican, the Republicans buy more. Republicans claim they will never use these guns, but this means that we are supposed to think they are stupidly wasting their money. Notice I never accused them, above, of being stupid. Maybe they won’t have to use their guns, because they know that we all know that they have huge stockpiles of weapons and we do not want to piss them off.

While Republicans are not as evil as Nazis, their psychology is just as dangerous to the future peace of the world as was the Nazi psychology.