They want us to hate each other. It’s all they’ve got:
Movement conservatism started off as a racket. Movement conservatism has always been about exacerbating and then profiting from existing cultural, social, and economic resentments. There was never any fall from an original ideological Eden. The corruption was there from the start. Packer is quite right to emphasize how the political and popular success of movement conservatism owes everything to its legitimization of a politics of resentment that arose in the 1960s.
The women and the blacks and the Mexicans took the jobs away, and the hippies lost us Vietnam and are even now making us feel bad about waving our big foam finger around, and the liberals keep harshing our buzz by reminding us we still have poor people, and bloggers are swearing on the Internets in order to make us feel bad about our lives. It’s all somebody else’s fault you’re not successful, you’re not strong, you’re not the person you want to be, the person you know deep down you should be. It’s all someone else’s fault, so don’t get off the couch, don’t pick up a sign, don’t sign a petition. Just vote for me, and be pissed off, and mutter darkly about the borders and the chicks. Just vote for me, and you won’t be any better off, but at least you’ll know you can blame somebody else for it. At least you’ll have that.
A.