The Conservative Movement Virus, BooMan, Booman Tribune, May 27, 2014

[T]he Conservative Movement is not the same thing as the Republican Party. The Conservative Movement is still animated by support for school prayer, opposition to Roe v. Wade, and a host of John Bircher heat-fever fantasies. When they gained power in Congress and in the state legislatures, they set out to do what they had been fighting for for decades. What they have done is totally consistent with what they’ve been saying for all these years.

The Conservative Movement has captured the Republican Party and they aren’t going to change just because the party needs to change if it wants to win. This is an anti-intellectual movement based in an anti-intellectual form of religion, that has been coupled with a paranoid and xenophobic strain of embittered nihilism. It’s greatest crime is that it has been able to take advantage of on-team solidarity to convince a lot of formerly moderate and reasonable people to abandon reality-based thinking.

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This political weaponization of stupidity is at the core of the Conservative Movement. Until recently, the Republican Party was an uneasy marriage between the monied classes and the dumb, but now the dumb are leading the dumb, and the monied classes are the ones demonstrating on-team loyalty. They don’t care about school prayer or abortion or gay marriage, but they dare not buck the Conservative Movement. To some degree, after ingesting so much right-wing media, even the monied classes may come to devalue science and take on more socially conservative views.

The overall effect is that people who identity with the Republican Party and want it to succeed are continuously getting dumber.