What Digby Said

...on the "Us" in the Us vs Them mentality of the Teabaggers.

The Real American tribe is (mostly) white, socially traditional and politically conservative. People who fit that criteria are, quite literally, the only people they care about. (At the more extreme edge, they are the only people they think are really people.) They simply can't empathize with those who don't fit that mold.

For most of us, this all comes down to what I call the Count of Monte Cristo effect. I read that book as a kid and the horror of a system which would allow an innocent person to be locked up forever so seared itself into my psyche that I automatically understood from that point on what injustice was. I didn't need to be a Frenchman in the Napoleonic era to relate. I'd been inside Edmond Dantès head, I'd been Edmond Dantès, and I'd felt, as a human being, what it was to be falsely accused and imprisoned.

I assume that most people have some sort of similar empathetic epiphany as children --- maybe it's just recognizing the hurt you've felt in the eyes of another. But it's fundamental to human development. Why, for some people, it stops at their own family or group, I don't know. But it's clear that among a great many people it does. I hear it every day among some of our most powerful leaders who blithely assert that terrorist suspects don't deserve the same rights as Americans. And yet, they know, that a large number of those terrorist suspects turned out to be innocent. They simply can't extend the horror they would feel if they found themselves in similar circumstances, to these other people. They simply can't accord them basic common humanity.

Even as a matter of self-preservation, I guess they just rely on the belief that their fellow tribesmen will recognize them and come to their rescue if they should ever find themselves in such circumstances. (Or they are so lacking in imagination that the idea that it could happen to them is unfathomable.) But as these folks down in Haiti are finding, their tribe isn't all powerful and they can't always fix things for them. It turns out that having a rule of law commonly respected the world over really comes in handy at a time like this. And every time the US government chisels away at our system of justice in the name of "protecting ourselves", or some yahoo prattles on about how someone doesn't deserve the same rights as somebody else, that fundamental protection gets weaker and weaker.

Digby has hit upon the basic pathology of the Teabagger.  As I talked about yesterday morning, it's all a cover for hiding the inherent racism in the movement.  The hypocrisy, the intellectual dishonesty, the flat out lies, and the unwavering hatred of Obama seemingly refuse to fit into a discernible pattern unless you're willing to admit that the core tenet of the movement is Hatred Of The Other.

And we can thank Bush/Cheney for that.  After 9/11, leveraging Hatred Of The Other became a full-time national job.  It was Muslims at first, but the list of the Other has increasingly grown to include a number of internal American groups.  Dehumanization of the Other was so effective against America's Muslim population (and still is) that they simply turned the technique upon anyone standing between the dead-ender rump of the GOP and power:  in this case, Democrats, liberals, scientists, and racial and social minorities.

Once you begin to demonize your own leaders and your own people, it gets to the point where everyone is an apostate at one point or another.  Empathy becomes impossible as everyone else besides yourself becomes the apostate who is wrong (see Dick Cheney over the weekend).  The whole pyramid become unsustainable.  We're seeing that now as the Hoffman Effect ravages the GOP.  But the fact of that matter is this particular pyramid can cause a lot of permanent damage to our country when it collapses.