The Darwinian Dystopia

For a bunch of folks that question evolution, conservatives like Glenn Beck have no problem subjecting the rest of America to natural selection where the weak are culled.  Open Left's Mike Lux:

Beck's essential message was that I crawled my way from the dung pile without any help, and that's what makes America great ,so we shouldn't help anyone in trouble. From his twisted personal story to his twisted vision of American history, Beck took rapturous CPACers on a classic tour of American conservative ideology. From his paranoid delusional ranting about how liberals hate anyone successful to his Social Darwinist view of society and nature, he laid out the conservative line and took it to its logical conclusion. And the audience loved it. The quintessential moment in the speech? When Beck explained why we shouldn't be helping anyone in need: "There's some sort of element of competition to life. Oh that's not natural. Really? Go watch the lions eat the weakest." And the audience burst into laughter and applause- as I wrote the other day, these conservatives really are into cruelty, so the idea of lions eating the weak got them going. 

It's brutal, as Mike says...the essence of brutality.  The strong must rule the weak, and if the weak cannot keep up, if they need help, if they need a safety net, they must be destroyed in order to allow for more resources to be divvied up among the survivors.

Conservatives' answer to the question "Am I my brother's keeper?" is a resounding Hell NO. And that is the essential divide between them and the progressivism which Beck describes as a cancer: progressives believe that all of us are in this together. When our child is weakened by a chronic illness, or our parent by old age, we don't abandon them in the wilderness so that the lion can eat them up (and then laugh about it). When our brother stumbles and hits bottom, we don't stand back and see if he can pull himself up by his own bootstraps, we lend him a helping hand. When our sister is abused and treated unfairly by an employer, we don't tell her she's on her own, we work with her to make things fairer. We believe in a community that helps each other survive and prosper, because we don't want to live in a world where only the strongest and wealthiest and - yes - luckiest survive. We don't have fantasies that all our success is of our own making because we know that without good families, good neighbors, good school and libraries and roads and bridges paid for by public dollars, that without all that, we'd be much less likely to make it on our own. In spite of Beck's paranoia, we have no problem with people being successful. I have never once heard any progressive attack Steve Jobs or Eric Schmidt for their success, or attack the local small businessperson making a good living because he or she is supplying products a community wants. But what we do believe is that those lucky enough to be successful have a responsibility to give something back to their fellow citizens. 

First Law Of Conservatism:  "I've got mine, screw you."

Social Darwinism has been around for a long, long time.  The basic hypocrisy of it is that without the people they consider to be peons to work for them and actually work at the jobs to provide the goods and services to earn the money to consume other goods and services, the folks at the top of the pyramid have no pyramid to be on top of.  Beck knows that.  He's been at the bottom of that pile.  Most of us have been at one point or another, out of work, scared, hurting.

We turned to others for help.  And help they did.

Beck got his help.  Then he got lucky.  Now the rest of America can go screw itself when beck shares his fantasy with others so they can pretend they still have something to deny people even more miserable than they are.  It keeps everyone in their place: the liberals, the gays and lesbians, the minorities, the women.

And that's just how the Glennsanity likes it.