Dwayne:
> There is a deep resistance to new information amongst
> many of these folks. I think what we're seeing is not
> so much the rise of conservative bloggers, but the
> web-enabled visiblity of a personality type - the
> crisis and authoriarian geek.
>
>
> It's not exciting to think of yourself as merely a
> put-upon member of the dwindling middle class, beset
> by unhelpful government and rapacious business,
> despised as an American by groups across the globe for
> reasons fair and foul. It makes much more sense and
> is much more uplifitng (in a perverse way) to think of
> yourself as a Westerner, a member of a beseiged tribe
> of free-living techno-adepts who must employ hard
> lessons via steel to a hostile world lest darkness
> fall. This idea is as old as Western expansion and
> probably older.
>
> What is the qualitative difference between these
> fantasies and the flights of fancy of someone who
> tries to experience Trenton N.J. as if it were Middle
> Earth?
WS: That is indeed an excellent observation. Right on, Dwayne.
The only thing I would add to it is the gender aspect, as these tendencies are limited, for the most part, to US males (and probably males elsewhere, but I have little knowledge of that). The US males feel emasculated by the gains of the feminist and gay rights movement 9which they acknowledge) as well by their total subjugation to the authoritarian corporate order (which they either fail or do not want to acknowledge). To vicariously restore their "virility" - they establish their identity through negating and rejecting the forces they see as 'emasculating" and thus engage in their "antitheses" or acts that are aggressive, destructive, menacing or even violent, but in a way that does not put them in any real danger of a "blowback." Examples include gay- women- or liberal- bashing in song (hip-hop) or on the internet, buying and displaying menacing or threatening objects (guns, SUVs, "gangsta" look), or espousing "hard core" value systems and ideologies (such as "pseudo-economism" or focus on the "bottom line", social "Darwinism," "smart-alec" nihilism, international unilateralism, militarism, etc.).
There was a post-psychoanalytic female theoretician whose name escapes me at the moment (Kelley, can you dig it out from your copious notes?) who proposed a similar argument to explain male violence against women: boys lack male role models as fathers are often absent from their lives, so unlike girls who develop their identities by emulating their mothers, boys often develop theirs by negating (an by implication hating) the feminine identity. I think this argument can travel some way explaining much of the male behavior - especially that many if not most men do not grow up until their 40s.
Wojtek