(Brexit: shocking disaster, incalculable foreseeable and unforseeable damage going forward, all over the world: just shows you how thoroughly a comparatively small bloc of passionate, deeply committed, deeply stupid voters can fuck things up for all of the rest of us, the world over. Anyway, in a related story...)
Why is it that some conservative leaders (unlike most Progressive and liberal leaders) can return from the career dead—even after they are pronounced “career dead” by the media and the voters?
Liberals and Progressives tend to “marginalize our once indispensable heroes, should they fail.” But that system does not necessarily obtain in the conservative world. The Right regularly offers up its most brutally spectacular failures as if they are still worthy of consideration (for example, discussion of Newt Gingrich as a Trump veep.) It’s a simple pass/fail test: if the supposedly career-dead right wing politician proves that she can still draw votes and money and command a significant remnant of her wingnut following: she can find a place at the political table of today even though she is a revived political zombie of yesteryear.
On the left, we JUNK our political failures ASAP (except for that very rare few who can actually achieve something if they are put into a policymaking position.) Why doesn’t that system also obtain on the right?
I think it’s their authoritarian personality thing, again. Their inner monologue goes like this.
“My fervent loyalty is to this leader/messiah; I have deep faith in my own judgment in identifying this leader/messiah as such, therefore…
...if it is shown as a matter of fact, that this leader/messiah I’ve chosen has not only failed but also disgraced herself…
...it cannot be *me* that was wrong (in my identification of this person as the leader/messiah.) Because if *that* were true, my personality and self-esteem would disintergrate…
...no, the downfall and disgrace of my leader/messiah does not mean that I fell for a charlatan. It means that my supposedly disgraced leader/messiah was a *victim*--a victim of persecution by all those powerful out of power liberals, a victim of the anti-American American media, a victim of persecution by the radical socialists who have subverted (etc. etc.)"
...and this inner monologue ends as follows:
“...and I’m a victim TOO, as always, no matter what my advantages of birth, gender, ethnicity, and opportunity! I was deprived of MY putative Messiah, by the malign forces of the left! So if that supposedly “disgraced” leader/messiah ever finds the courage to return to public life—You bet that there will be a lot of people like me who will support them *again,* whether they were cleared or not!"
And thus it is the political careers of even the most embarrassing right wingers can sometimes be revived.
And so we see that Trump released his new list of A-list "evangelical advisors” to his campaign the other day. And so we see Newsmax re-introducing its readers to former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann as follows:
Michele Bachmann is Trump’s Top Female Evangelical Voice
And so we see how NewsMax (that right wing evangelical, “news packaged for right wing evangelicals” news outlet) describes Bachmann’s exit from elective office:
She served four terms in Congress, and after her presidential bid failed to gain traction in 2011, she won her last term in the House of Representatives in 2012.
And - for contrast - here is how Wikipedia describes that very same exit from elective office:
In 2013, Bachmann was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, the Federal Election Commission, the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee, the Urbandale Police Departmentand the Federal Bureau of Investigation because of alleged campaign finance violations in her 2012 campaign for President.[160][161]
Different ways of laying out the narrative there, eh?
But how the hell, you ask, can any political figure targeted for lawbreaking by a whole posse of different investigative agencies, get off the hook so quickly and so fast, and so completely that any wrongdoing doesn’t even count anymore? (You and I aren’t elected officials. If the FBI and a whole bunch of agencies start investigating us and get on our asses, we can’t just instantly end the investigations and shake ‘em off, once and for all, like Michele Bachmann. What the hell is her secret, for avoiding accountability via the law?)
Well, it turns out that malefactors in the US Congress have an escape pod that is unavailable to “jerks like us.” The New York Times explains, in this blog piece from November 2014, headlined “How to Make an Ethics Probe Disappear:"
In the midst of the inquiry, Ms. Bachmann announced that she would retire from Congress after her current term. Since the (House ethics committee) only investigates sitting members, she can celebrate the New Year as a private citizen no longer under a cloud.
Ducked the investigation by resigning and running off, never cleared, but never convicted either… Thus she has passed the "character” portion of the Standards for the Republican, Conservative, and Evangelical Leadership Test! And another embarrassingly awful conservative failure has been asked represent the Republican and evangelical agenda! There *are* second acts, in bughouse Republican America.
Links:
www.newsmax.com/…
en.m.wikipedia.org/...
takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/...