Today in history someone visited POLITUSIC with an interesting curiosity: do conservatives ever get tired of being wrong?
Outside of Republicanland, intellectual curiosity is rewarded rather than dissuaded, so we’d like to answer the question with a little investigation into republicans getting tired of being wrong all the time.
Lord knows that I, too, would like to witness the ever-illusive nocturnal creature that is classified as, “An Aware-That-They’re-Wrong Republican”, but the answer to the question itself is actually a short one… unfortunately, the answer is no. Conservatives never get tired of being wrong. Seeking why republicans never get tired of bathing in republican bubble fallacy is where curiosity pays the petitioner.
To fully understand why republicans demonstrate a tireless “wrongness”, we need to break the Conservative species into the its two primary castes: Conservative Voters (mortgage-paying residents of Republicanland), and Conservatives For A Living (also known as the practice of Professional Republicanism: politicians, lobbyists, PACs, Fox News employees, etc.).
Why Republicanland conservatives never get tired of being wrong:
When we are discussing the extreme right wing, the entire preface of the question becomes illegitimate. In Republicanland, conservatives are never wrong. And if they are, then they create a theory to support a paranoid assertion, post it online, then cite it as a supporting source. True facts are optional. Republican facts can be pulled from the bubble whenever necessary.
There are only two absolute truths in Republicanland that do not include an omniscient deity with a long, white beard: Democrats are always wrong, and Tea Party republicans are always right. Now that the Republican Party is at war with itself, their faith in conservative Truthiness has become even more pure: support Tea Party absolutism, or whatever the heck anyone else says is, “Wrong, wrong, wrong! I’m going to cover my ears now, and shout really loudly so I can’t hear what you’re saying, because I’m right and you’re wrong!”
You see, if an isolated culture doesn’t believe in sunshine, then you can’t ask to acknowledge it. For many, they have intermingled their religious faith so deeply with their political identifications, that the two exist as one – therefore they are never, ever wrong. They can’t be wrong or their God Himself is questioned.
“Being wrong” is to Republicanland what Dryness is to the Pacific Ocean. It’s a different world that is fully supported by Conservative media outlets, talk radio, and online. A common joke-thread around POLITUSIC is that extreme republicans outnumber democrats as visitors to the website 50:1 – because they are the ones seeking self-justification via Google searches (… actually, the Tea Party is more prone to search on Bing than Google from what we can tell.) Democrats don’t search online for blog posts to justify what they already believe; the far right wing does. It’s a very clear distinction between how each side behaves and reacts to facts, or rather what they believe to be facts being challenged.
Point being: conservatives are NEVER wrong in Republicanland. That’s why they moved there. It’s easy, it’s conformable, and it never changes. Conservative. If a staunch conservative hears something different than that which they believe, then they search online not for the new idea, but for ranting support of their old idea – research to reinforce what they already know as their personal truth, rather than what might actually be. There is zero potential for growth in that sort of life process, which is why it is such an isolating one. It’s a self-justifying world in Republicanland, and each time the cycle repeats it becomes that more and more isolated from the outside.
Yeah. Republicanland is a stressful place, really. Its meant to be that way, which brings us to the controlling caste of the Conservative species.
Why professional conservatives never get tired of being wrong:
Unlike in Republicanland, in the land of Professional Republicanism, the premise of the question, “Do conservatives ever get tired of being wrong?” isn’t falsehood’ed out of existence. In this world it is a simple matter of, “How much money does it take to compensate for throwing morals out the 90th floor penthouse window?”
To understand Professional Republicanism, you just need to understand pure capitalism; profit only for one’s self as a religion. The PR crowd seeks as much profit as humanly possible without 1) going to jail; 2) being shot with the very gun for which they lobbied Congress to protect (unless you’re friends with Dick Cheney in which case, you’re screwed), or; 3) being required to endure more than 1 dinner a year within earshot of Donald Trump.
There is power in maintaining “The Wrong”. Where there is Power, there is Profit. Professional Republicanism is as simple as that: control The Wrong, and money will always follow.
In the case of the Obama era, controlling “The Wrong” means ensuring that there exists as much hate and misinformation about the President and his policies as is possible in a free country – boy howdy is that a lot of misinformation. Who knew it was possible to keep such a large group of people completely detached from reality for so long? We at least have to give a head nod for their ability to control their masses.
Controlling what scares people is the first step in controller the larger Wrong. 95% of the time in Professional Republicanism practice, it means instilling fear, and then follow that quickly with anger, so that people don’t hide in their homes for too long. The PR crowd is very, very good at what they do.
Are professional republicans ever tired of being wrong? Indeed, no – they encourage it. They create it. They plant the seeds of Wrong in the heads of their base, because the more wrong there is, the more money they make. They LOVE being wrong… and why not? If they create an alternate reality for the extreme right wing base… the sane world can’t argue against it. It’s like debating faith. Creating a Wrong Reality is the most profitable venture in the history of politically-motivated business ventures. They toast expensive French wine poured into Tiffany’s goblets to “being wrong”.
They will never tire, which is why the rest of us have to vote.
