Let’s start with wikipedia:
Obedience, in human behavior, is the quality of being obedient, which describes the act of carrying out commands, or being actuated.[1] Obedience differs from compliance, which is behavior influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is behavior intended to match that of the majority.
Humans have been shown to be surprisingly obedient in the presence of perceived legitimateauthority figures, as demonstrated by the Milgram experiment in the 1960s, which was carried out by Stanley Milgram to discover how the Nazis managed to get ordinary people to take part in the mass murders of the Holocaust. The experiment showed that obedience to authority was the norm, not the exception. A similar conclusion was reached in the Stanford prison experiment.
I was struck this week by how meekly obedient the Republicans who comment here are. While their most cherished economic philosophies literally collapse around them, they still fall into line and parrot the party line. There is no “hey the Emperor has no clothes!” moment. The empty-headed chants of “Democrats fault” and “the economy is good” actually get stronger and more the truth is revealed and the more ”Chicago School” economic theories are demonstrated to be pure snake oil.
I did not read a single admission of reality from the right all week. Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. Does anyone doubt that liberals would not clamor to agree in unison “we fucked up?” Does anyone doubt that liberals would pillory their party leaders if they had been so wrong for so long? Of course we would, and indeed we have pilloried our leaders for being much less wrong over issues of much less importance. (see Bill Clinton/blow job/Impeachment).
Not Republicans though. They are hanging tough. Lockstep obedience is now, as it always has been, the Republican party’s bedrock strength and it is a wonder to behold.
Duffy reminds us that Democrats “controlled” Congress for 18 months so they must be responsible for the meltdown. Rick Jensen chimed in that the economy is actually great and Mike W contends that socialism is good, provided Bush says so. I’m sure our DL wingnuts are not exceptional. Rather, this country is infested with people who would adopt (have adopted) the most horrendously anti-American beliefs in a flash if someone in authority tells them to do so.
The veneer of the rugged individual American Republican is less than a micron thin around here, but how could that be? I mean think about it; over the past eight years, a handful of bankers and lawyers went into a Casio with our credit card and blew billions of dollars at the craps table. Now our Republicans commenters are falling all over themselves to give them another shot at striking it rich while steadfastly refusing to deal out even the most feeble half-hearted rebuke. Why?
Certainly they don’t get anything tangible out of being so obsequious. Hube, Mike W, even Dave Burris make no where near enough money to be an actual beneficiary of the Republican system. These middle class Republicans are unreconstructed dupes and suckers.
It is perhaps too facile to say that they view politics through an absurdly reductive lens that reduces everything to teams. While they do seem to derive their identity from their GOP team affiliation, I have to think that there is something deep and darker going on. As I read comments on this blog, I feel the chill of a shriveled and shrunken morality on the right which is as old as humanity itself.
It is a sick and twisted morality that makes it okay to raise billions of dollars overnight in order to help the richest of the rich avoid some discomfort, but complains bitterly when exposed to the lowly and truly needy.
It is a morality that we were tricked into let out of its cage because Ronald Reagan had a winning smile, and it is a morality that we will be very lucky to get it back in its cage in our lifetime.