NIETZSCHE NAILS THE WINGNUTS

I monitor gasbag radio, blogs and magazines and I never cease to be amazed at how liberals are demonized by people who know little or nothing about liberals. A fairly recent smear was the claim that the biased liberal media wanted Sarah Palin to have had an abortion, something so preposterous one looks to psychopathology for an explanation of such claims. The wingnut obsession with defining liberals seems to have been foreshadowed by Nietzsche in his The Genealogy of Morals:

The slave revolt in morality begins when the ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who are prevented from a genuine reaction, that is, something active, and who compensate for that with a merely imaginary vengeance.* While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant affirmation of one’s own self, slave morality from the start says “No” to what is “outside,” “other,” to “a not itself.” And this “No” is its creative act. This transformation of the glance which confers value — this necessary projection towards what is outer instead of back onto itself — that is inherent in ressentiment. In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself. Psychologically speaking, it needs external stimuli in order to act at all — its action is basically reaction.

By contrast, imagine for yourself “the enemy” as a man of ressentiment conceives him — and right here we have his action, his creation: he has conceptualized “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” and as a fundamental idea, from which he now also thinks his way to an opposite image and counterpart, a “good man” — himself! . . .

The wingnuts love Ann Coulter and Fats Limbaugh because they demonize liberals and remind them that only wingnuts are the Good Americans.