The wingnut mind and its limitations

A striking feature of the wingnut mind is its lack of imagination.  As I've noted before, for weeks now far-right blogs and sites (especially their comment threads) have been awash in fantasies of violence and slaughter, of shooting and hanging liberals, showing us who's boss when we "come after" them and try to take their guns or round them up or whatever they think we're going to do.  The expected circumstances are vague -- it's the thought of using their guns to take us out that they relish, in sharp relief.

They expect us to come down to their level and engage them in some kind of physical confrontation in which their guns will give them the upper hand, because guns are what they have and what they know.  That's not how it works.  When humans set out to cull wolves from an area, they don't do it by coming down to the wolves' level and fighting them physically so that the wolves have a chance to rip them to pieces.  They do it with high-powered rifles from a distance, preferably from helicopters, or use poison.  We're not going to deal with our current wild-animal problem in ways that play to their strengths, either.  As I suggested here, we're already fighting them by focusing on the areas where we have the advantage -- propaganda, technology, culture, communications, economic power.

Especially given their inflamed rhetoric, I'm sure a few groups of wingnuts here and there will shoot a few individuals or attack a few pieces of infrastructure that support our cities (another vivid fantasy I've seen on their blogs).  But they won't do enough damage to "win" or affect the long-term trajectory of the country -- not even close.  I doubt they'll ever again accomplish anything as spectacular as their raid on the Capitol, which was scary enough but lasted only a few hours and achieved nothing except to turn a certain number of Republican politicians against them.  And as with the Capitol raid, the individual perpetrators of violence will be identified, tracked down, and arrested, while those who support it too heatedly with rhetoric will be fired, ostracized, and rendered unemployable.  Such people will be left physically unharmed but financially ruined -- crushed by forms of power against which guns are useless.

I keep calling them "the stupid one-third", and the stupidity matters.  It's not just a matter of two opposing but basically comparable world-views.  People whose thinking is so limited operate at several critical disadvantages.  For one thing, as I explained in the earlier post, our world-view is mostly consistent because it's based on reality, and reality is consistent and objectively knowable.  Theirs is prone to fragmentation because it's based on delusions, and delusions vary from person to person and can change randomly.  (The left is prone to factional splits too, but these are usually over real policy differences, not over whether Satanic lizard people from outer space exist.)  Also, they lack any nuanced sense of history (their constant invocations of the Founders are clichéd, trite, and ignorant), any deep sense of how the world actually works, or any ability to think multiple moves ahead or to accurately anticipate the actions of their opponents.

The storming of the Capitol is a case in point.  They had no soberly-considered set of objectives which they reasonably expected this action to achieve.  At best there was some idea that if they could stop the electoral-vote count and perhaps murder some number of Democratic and "RINO" politicians, this would somehow nullify the election result, intimidate the political establishment, and allow Trump to remain in power (this is a bit like believing that burning your credit-card bill will make the debt disappear).  They had no grasp of the resilience of institutions and procedures in a quarter-millennium-old democracy, or of the fact that when enormously-powerful people are temporarily scared out of their wits by a threat of personal violence, they tend to strike back, not back down.  They didn't seem to understand that threatening Republican leaders or beating and killing police officers would profoundly alienate people who have shown at least some sympathy for their cause.  They turned the colossal might of the federal government against their movement, while inflicting no substantial damage on their enemies at all.

And so it goes.  As I said, I expect occasional further violent incidents, followed each time by ostracisms, firings, and arrests and prosecution.  It's the furious lunges of a cornered animal against the practiced and skilled responses of an experienced hunter.  The animal may be big and noisy and scary, but you know who's going to win in the end.

The "soft power" arena, too, illustrates their mental limitations.  I've written a lot on the subtle role of popular movies, TV, and suchlike in driving and normalizing the kind of cultural changes that so upset the fundies and wingnuts.  The occasional efforts of the enemy to produce analogous counter-propaganda (the "Christian movie" industry comes to mind) are invariably clunky, preachy, and lacking in any appeal except to those who already believe.

But the same seems to apply even with much less demanding works.  For example, the Trump era has provoked a great abundance of liberal satirical music videos mocking the enemy's pomposity, blundering, and stupidity (see for example here, here, and here).  But despite the range of right-wing blogs and sites I read, I've never seen any analogous right-wing musical take-downs of left-wing figures or movements, and I really doubt they exist.  The humor, imagination, and skill to produce such things (however modest) just aren't there.

They are fanatically invested in keeping Trump in power because, in spite of experience, they believe that political power is the prime mover that determines everything else.  On our side, at least a significant number of people realize that politics is only one arena among several, and that political wins and losses are much more the effect than the cause of deeper cultural tendencies.

Crippled by its delusions, the wingnutosphere exists in a sustained state of tedious rage and pitifully-transparent efforts to sound frightening.  It's a self-created prison of cramped minds unable to escape, not because they're locked in, but because they're unable to conceive of the world beyond the cage of their own limitations.