Salon: Conservative brains wired for “mass hysteria” and “folk devils”

RedState.com ^ | 7/30/14 | Steve Berman

[publius911]

Salon: Conservative brains wired for “mass hysteria” and “folk devils”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

OK

[Gumdrop]

Oh? So what happened in 2008 when a candidate for POTUS claimed to be “the One’, claimed that it was the moment for the level of the oceans to fall, etc..

Seems to me our country has been living in a perpetual “Mass Hysteria” mode for nearly 6 years now - and it is not Christian Conservatives who are implicated.

[ek_hornbeck]

Conservative fears of nonexistent or overblown boogeymen — Saddam’s WMD, Shariah law, voter fraud, Obama’s radical anti-colonial mind-set, Benghazi, etc. — make it hard not to see conservatism’s prudent risk avoidance as having morphed into a state of near permanent paranoia, especially fueled by recurrent “moral panics,” a sociological phenomenon in which a group of “social entrepreneurs” whips up hysterical fears over a group of relatively powerless “folk devils” who are supposedly threatening the whole social order. Given that conservatism seems to be part of human nature — just as liberalism is — we’re going to need all the help we can get in figuring out how to live with it, without being dominated, controlled and crippled by it.

What about non-existent or overblown bogeymen that plague the Leftist mind? Every bout of bad weather is a harbinger of the "global warming" apocalypse. Every politically incorrect joke or remark is evidence that the US is on the brink of a takeover by the Ku Klux Klan or by neo-nazis, and that the entire population must be deconditioned of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Every corporate board meeting or slightest cut/adjustment to government entitlements is clearly evidence of a grand conspiracy to "oppress" minorities and the poor.

Seems to me that liberals no strangers to mass end-is-nigh hysteria and absurd conspiracy theories themselves.

[Robert DeLong]

I missed 2 that I was sure Salon.com would run with. Oh well I got the rest right!!!