ebonlock | Filthy elvish tricks

Lance Mannion has a brilliant post up about what he calls the "Orc Logic" that has become foundational to the right wing:

At any given moment, any and every day of the week, all over the Right side of the bandwidth, dozens of conservative bloggers have put up posts that all say pretty much the same thing:

"Liberals are bad people because I can imagine them doing/saying/thinking/acting exactly as I'm doing/saying/thinking/acting right here."

Meanwhile, dozens of their colleagues are putting up posts that all pretty much say:

"Liberals are bad people because I believe, without any evidence, and even in the face of much evidence to the contrary, they do not practice any of the virtues I'm convinced I have, even though there's no evidence that I have ever practiced those virtues, even though there is in fact plenty of evidence that I have definitely never practiced them."

Think Michelle Malkin on racism and now John Derbyshire on courage.

I've called their "thinking" Orc Logic, based on a passage in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in which a gang of Orcs complain about some "trick" an elf has played on them and then congratulate themselves on having done something even worse to one of their own friends.

Orc Logic is the habit of thinking that whatever you do is right and whatever people you don't like do is wrong, even if they're doing exactly what you're doing.

Tolkien didn't create Orcs to satirize people of a particular political bent. Everyone is guilty of Orc Logic sometime. It creeps into the posts and comments on many Liberal blogs from time to time, including this one, although my readers are too kind and polite and I don't get called on it often enough.

But Orc Logic has become the defining rhetorical trope of the Right Wing propaganda machine. You want a quick sample? Stroll on over to their side of the street and look at their posts on the Virginia Tech massacre. See how fast and broadly they've assigned blame and, boiled down, all the blame is assigned implicitly to Liberalism---because as we all know it's liberals who don't let college students pray in English class, liberals who don't let drunken frat boys pack heat, liberals who have turned our young men into cowards and girly-men, liberals who have let too many damn immigrants into the country, liberals who won't let us lock up our young women in single-sex dorms guarded, I would have to guess, by large, brawny eunuchs wielding curved swords...

This is the call. The response is self-congratulation.

We know better. We believe in God. We don't date crazy foreigners. We are manly-men. If we'd been there this wouldn't have happened. We'd have stopped him somehow. We'd have stood up to him. We'd have caught the bullets in our teeth, slapped the gun out of his hand, knocked him flat with a flick of our finger. We'd have made a gun of our own magically appear in our hand and our aim would have been true and we'd have shot the sucka dead before he could've fired off his first round.

We know we'd have done all this and survived and been heroes because we've told ourselves so a thousand times.

Orc Logic is seductive. It is vanity plus sloth. Self-love and moral and intellectual laziness combined. Once you let it become your habit of thought you are freed forever from self-examination, self-criticism, self-judgment. You are freed from having to worry about your own behavior because you know that you are a better person than they are, whoever they are, and that whatever you do is automatically the right thing because you are not them and whatever they do is wrong.

Orc Logic is extremely useful to people whose politics and moral code are devoted exclusively to defending their money and their privileges. If you know without having to think about it that you are a good person you don't have to listen to any calls to sacrifice and pleas for fair dealing and demands that you do an inconvenient right thing.

Of course this is what has made it useful to leaders and corporate financiers of the Right Wing Movement.

Since at least the New Deal, the Right has motivated itself through a mixture of outraged vanity, self-righteous anger, and fear.

We are good people, how can Roosevelt suggest that the mess this country is in is our fault! How dare he suggest it!

That's the vanity and the outrage.

The fear is that they will come in the night and take it all away. But even more terrifying is the thought: What if they are right? What if it is our fault to some or any degree? Shouldn't we then give up some of our money and privileges? Isn't this one of the things the religion we all pride ourselves on practicing teaches?

The trick has been to stoke the vanity to provoke the outrage and then exploit the first fear while shutting down any thought that might lead to second.

So they tell themselves and their voters over and over again how good they are, how virtuous they are, how favored by God and Nature, how they deserve all their comforts and wealth and privilege---or if they don't actually possess those comforts and that wealth and privilege how they ought to have them because they are so deserving---and then they gasp in horror and point, Look, they are coming to take it all away!

Or:

They have taken it away or keeping you from having it!

Keep them angry enough, keep them vain enough, keep them scared enough, and they won't think, they'll just react. Don't ever let them think. This is why you keep changing the subject. Look over here, look over there, look up, look down, look all around, look everywhere and at everything but yourselves.

Give them enemies to hate that will let them love themselves unquestioningly.

Give them reason after reason to hate those enemies so they never have to ask why.

It's the faggots in the schools teaching our kids, it's the Feminists turning our daughters into lesbians and our boys into girls, it's the atheists tearing down our Christmas trees, it's the dirty hippies undermining the President's glorious war, it's the rappers, it's the immigrants, it's the tree-hugging environmentalist alarmists, it's the Islamofascists, it's the Christian-hating Hollywood Jews, it's them! It's the Liberals!

We hate them, them and their filthy elvish tricks.