I was watching Scarborough Country on MSNBC the other day. He seemed to suggest that he thinks Christians are being persecuted. That got me thinking about a larger issue. Why is it that conservatives love to revel in fantasies of their own marginality and persecution? Why is it they have these persecution fantasies? You don't just notice this with the religious right. You notice this amongst all varieties of social conservative. "Christians" think they are being persecuted by evil secularists who run everything from Wal-Mart to the courts. People who oppose gay rights think they are continuously looked down upon, and their views are constantly under assault by, the "gay agenda." So I must ask this question: why is it conservatives love to play victims, and fantasize about being persecuted?
One thing that is interesting about the conservative persecution fantasy is that it is remarkably similar to leftist persecution fantasies during the early 20th century. Conservative complaints about an effete overclass, which the common middle American man can never defeat is remarkably similar to Marxist beliefs of the 1920s and 1930s, that the common man was caught in a machine run by the elite capitalists. Complaints by people like Rush Limbaugh, that the "liberal elite" is running and ruining everything are remarkably similar to Marxist complaints about how evil capitalists were doing the same thing.
One way to answer the question about the right-wing persecution complex is to look at where most conservatives are on the ideological spectrum. Any democrat who might be viewed as "far left" (such as Denis Kucinich) isn't a fraction as far to the left as people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Tom DeLay or Dick Cheney are to the right. People on the extreme of either end of the ideological spectrum are ideologues. Since most conservatives are so far to the right, many of them are ideologues.
Ideologues are uninterested in fact or reason. They are convinced that they are always right about everything. Thus no one can convince them they are wrong about anything or reason with them. If you knew the absolute truth about everything, why would you let someone use facts or anything else to convince you that you don't know the absolute truth about everything?
Since conservatives are ideologues, it appears that part of their ideology is that they are constantly being persecuted by an overclass that looks down on them. The overcalass that they believe is perseucting them is what they call the "liberal elite." Much like Emmanuel Goldstien in George Orwell's book "Nineteen-Eightyfour," this elite overclass deosn't actually exist. It isn't the ACLU that forces Wal-Mart clerks to say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," it is the management of Wal-Mart, who sees "Happy Holidays" as being more neutral in our pluralistic society. It isn't the "Hollywood elite" who continuesly pushes every form of social deviance through movies and television, it is the economic conservatives who run Hollywood. Hollywood and Wal-Mart are both commercial enterprises, run by economic conservatives. The same can be said about everything from the media to corporate policies regarding equal employment for gays.
Becuase conservatives are ideologues, we can never convince them that they aren't being persecuted. Thus, we cannot reason with these conservatives on this issue, just like we can't reason with Bush on the escalation in Iraq, or that Saddam wasn't actually behind 9/11, or that WMDs were not actually found in Iraq. They are both convinced that they know the absolute truth.
One of the more ridiculous of the persecution fantasies is the idea that somehow Christians are being persecuted. Now by "Christians," typically we mean Evangelicals. Evangelicals routinely use the term "Christian" interchangeably with the term "Evangelical." Except for a few fundamentalist Catholics, few Catholics and few mainline protestants claim to be persecuted. And few of these people use the term "Christian" to be interchangeable with their denomination.
What makes the claim that "Christians" are persecuted so ridiculous is that 85% of all Americans are Christians. Wal-Mart isn't run by atheists. The courts aren't full of atheists. One toy the religious right loves is when some companies tell their employees to saw "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" to customers. The religious right sees this as a great assault on "Christians." Never mind that the decision to have employees say this (usually the companies don't care which one their employees use anyway) has a marketing and public relations rationale. It isn't because atheists run corporate America and hate "Christians."
We saw another example of this religious right persecution fantasy with former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and his Ten Commandments monument. Make no mistkae, Moore put this monument outside of the Alabama Courthouse deliberately to draw a lawsuit from the ACLU. And the only possible outcome of such a lawsuit would be that a federal court orders Moore to remove the monument. And then he tried to turn himself into a "martyr" by refusing to abide by the orders of the federal court, which costed him his job.
Another area where the right-wing loves to play the victim is with gay rights. They love to act as though gays demanding equal rights is an assault on their "values" and actually the demand for greater rights than everyone else by the "homosexual agenda." They claim to be persecuted by the "homosexual agenda" when, in something typical of a right-wing claim, the exact opposite is true. It is the right-wing who is persecuting gays, not the other way around.
This again goes to an interesting point in these right-wing claims, regardless of if they are about gay-rights, religion, or whatever: that these people who claim to be persecuted are actually part of a majority group. Typically it has been minorities (or sometimes majority groups that have been disenfranchised and thus had been politically powerless for generations) that have been persecuted. You can't have congress persecute the majority, when the majority is what elects congress.
Another area you see these ludicrous arguments are in relation to the media. Conservatives claim they are victims of "liberal bias" in the media. In reality, the media (whether its CBS, ABC, NBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, or whoever) is not biased. Reality has a liberal bias. The MSM is biased only so far as it is biased towards reality. Since conservative claims typically don't come from fact or reality, and yet what the MSM reports on does come from fact and reality, conservatives claim liberal bias. This is a useful mechanism, because it allows them to dismiss all negative stories about them as being the products of bias.
Again, in a manner you find throughout conservative claims, what they claim is actually the exact opposite of what is true. It isn't the MSM that is biased, and the "conservative media" that is "fair and balanced" and presents "the conservative side of the story." The conservative media doesn't just present the conservative side of the story, it does exactly what conservatives accuse the MSM of doing: it distorts facts, makes up reality, exists solely for the benefit of a single political party, and filters everything through a partisan and ideological lens.
Thomas Frank talks about this conservative persecution fantasy in his book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" His convincingly argues that these persecution fantasies are generated by the (decidedly not persecuted) economic conservatives who run the republican party. They use these fantasies to stroke the anger and indignation of social conservatives. They make those social conservatives feel helpless and like victims. The enemy, they are told, is the Frenchified "liberal elite," who looks down its nose at these "regular people" in "middle America." It is this persecution complex that the social conservatives end up with, that caused them to continue electing republicans.
It doesn't matter that, when in office, those same republicans pass laws that screw the social conservatives economicly. It doesn't matter that these republicans deregulate, deunionize, keep wages low, outsource jobs, keep college expensive and keep healthcare unaffordable. Not only that, but the republicans in power ignore the demands of the social conservatives. Abortion is never outlawed, school praryer never returns, gay rights are never rolled back.
The social conservatives don't care because every two years they are again told about the evils of gay marriage and abortion, and how democrats have Christianity and love killing babies. The fiscal conservatives running for office make the social conservatives feel like perseucted victims. And because of that, the social conservatives return to the ballot box again and again, to proudly reelect their republican masters.