Pride and Unintended Consequences.
Yesterday, I ran this item, which noted the following:
It wasn't the first time I noted this.
It's sometimes claimed, although I haven't researched it, that the moral descent of Berlin in the 1920s lead in part to people voting for the Nazis in the early 30s. I.e., their revulsion over what they were seeing lead them to an extreme reaction, it's claimed. At least one writer has noted:
It seems grotesque in retrospect, but Hitler posed as a moral crusader gallantly battling the forces of iniquity, corruption, and even deceit. Many Germans, horrified by the loosening of moral standards in Germany after World War I, were duped by his promises of moral rejuvenation. Hitler’s project resonated with many who were disgusted by the rampant hedonism and carnality of Weimar high culture and popular culture. Whether one views Hitler and Nazism as a Utopian and technocratic expression of the modernist project, or as an atavistic reaction against modernity, or as some blend of the two (“reactionary modernism” or “conservative revolution”), or as something completely unique, it is clear that Nazism promised a resurrection or awakening of the German people that involved a revival of morality that was in the process of decay and degeneration.
Hitler as Moral Crusader and Liar, Richard Weikart, abstract.
Extreme wealth in upper Russian society certainly contributed to the rise of the Communists in late imperial Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution.
The point of this is this. While the Southern Populist ethics that have spread into the American middle class country wide (more on this soon) are full of hypocrisies, people do have a limit. Most people don't think night and day about politics, which opens the void to people like Rep. Ward of Casper, whose reaction to a Pride event in Casper lead to this headline:
Ward's rise as a legislature in a state that she has almost no connections with stunned me. She's of the extreme right and has a Weltanschauung that she's imported from the Rust Belt, where she previously lived and politics. She's associated herself in politics with Christianity, but in a way that suggest she doesn't understand her claimed faith very well. In Illinois, she showed up associated with some outrage over a school teacher who claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, which in fact they do. In Wyoming's last legislative session, she made the claim that Christians are not their brother's keeper, and that the story of Cain and Able in the Old Testament really only meant that you just weren't supposed to kill your brother, but otherwise could let him suffer.
Middle Class Germans of the 1920s were heir to a long Christian tradition. Upper class Germans were as well, and frankly lower class Germans were too, that latter class being the one most vulnerable to Nazi and Communist agitation. Russia had a long history of Christianity, leading into 1917.
Wealthy societies produce largess. Largess produces self-indulgence, and a lot of the self-indulgence will, seemingly almost inevitably, turn into sexual narcissism and individual domination. Disgust inevitably results by those who don't chose that path, which is, at the end of the day, most people. But when a society becomes focused on it, those willing to stand most in the opposing spotlight, no matter how extreme they are, will take up most of the opposing light.
Immoderation leads, inevitably, to immodesty, which leads, almost inevitably, to opposing immoderation. When toleration becomes a demand for absolutely acceptance, in categories of extremes, those masses simply trying to get through their days will listen to the loudest voices.
Southern Populism gave us what the Southern Strategy took into the GOP. Losing the moorings on genuine civil rights, amongst other things, gave us a warped left wing view that individualistic self definition is a right, no matter how destructive or delusional. That latter left wing view is pushing the other, far right populist view, to success, at least temporarily.
