Honor-based peoples are prone to see relations with competitors in war metaphors. You can imagine the reasons. Ditto with Republicans, who admit in private that they declared war on liberals forty-five years ago (the 'culture wars' are a Republican invention), and who often use war metaphors in business policies, and who take every election as a matter of winning all or losing all. Anthropologist H. H. Turney-High once advanced the interesting thesis that pre-modern societies waged war to defeat, whereas today's soldiers wage war to conquer. For Republicans the first applies to elections, the second to governance. Republicans are out for the land grab, the whole shebang. They are nothing if not committed, which usually implies fanaticism and a willingness to lie, Texas style, by which I mean, the 'bald-faced lie', where blatant and deliberate untruths are intended to rub in to the receptive the significance of between-the-lines message.
With these introductory remarks as a preface, we now ask what happens if and when a Republican screws up and violates the ideology or otherwise embarrasses the Party's chances at winning an election? In a word: honor-killing. It has been a recent issue, over the nonsensical notions of Senate candidate Aiken. The context is the Republicans' weakness with women voters. Candidate Aiken is exposing this flaw dangerously. The party leaders are strategizing an honor-killing, and Mitt was put in position of stand-in mother (doubt he'd like the analogy, but it works well enough). This could get ugly, however, because Aiken has a gripe with Party Central, not so different from the rift between the old guard and the Tea Party. Gotta love it when they go after one another. Why pay to see Jurassic Park?
Political honor-killings arise when a powerful person is iced by his/her own ilk by other than legally ordained means. Aiken has every legal right to go it alone and put his fate in the hands of Missourians. The "relatives' then remind the remiss mother of her duty, whereat Governor Romney agrees to hold him down. When Enron was in its death-throes, Kenneth Lay had long been on personal terms with George Bush and then Vice-President Cheney. By his acts, and especially the culture he inaugurated and nourished at Enron, he could prove a formidable foe if insulted. Given Republicans and given the context, the time was ripe for an honor-killing. First, Lay was sympathized with (but his requests unrequited), then ignored, then ostracized. Then, curiously, he died. Cynics abound who wonder aloud if it was all that simple.
As an observer of appearances and behavior, I noted at the time that Lay had all the appearance of a person sleeping well and even to an extent relishing the commotion, until he lost his pull with the big boys. None of which means he couldn't have been in a depression, But these arrogant types do, as mentioned, compartmentalize, and Lay must have been very good at it. If he was so disconcerted, I doubt that his body would rebel (the death was ruled 'natural'), for he appeared fit and looked as if there was longevity in the genes. If he were to crack, he would handle it in his own way. I could see Lay thinking along the lines of Joseph Goebbels whose last days offer an interesting linkage with honor-killing psychodynamics. The Wikipedia account holds that --
"Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to kill his six children by injecting them with morphine and then, when they were unconscious, crushing an ampule of cyanide in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but it was Magda Goebbels and Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, who then administered the cyanide. Shortly afterward, Goebbels and his wife went up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves."
In primitive societies where it happens that initiation or other reason requires taking children early from their mothers, it is the norm that the mothers play the central role when push comes to shove. Everyone knows they can hardly like the idea, but women have a role in society that honor requires be fulfilled as tradition dictates. All that varies as between different honor-based cultures is precisely where it's applied and how it's managed. That Goebbels's wife attended to the murder of their six children might well suggest her devotion to ideology, or at the least, willingness to uphold honor, on behalf of her husband and the higher cause. One has to presume that most women not strapped to a greater-than-life ideology would have long before tried to get the children out of the country and to safety. The true believers in the Reich were ideologues and behaved accordingly, up to and including honor-killings.
Behind bars
Because Republicans are weighted down with so many quasi-deserved entitlements, they require to hold so much back that it becomes easy to understand how they can actually feel themselves embattled. The better reality has it that they are imprisoned by their own cajolery. In order to compartmentalize something this serious they require strength of conviction in their ideology; many will not stop short of bald-faced lies to back it up. Compensation, if you will, for not being able ever to be intellectually or emotionally honest except with their own kind.
Up till now we have considered primarily the party heavies. Most of the Republicans we meet are of course not in that class but will share various traits with them in a bewildering variety of combinations. Frankly, though, the storyline will not considerably vary. Hypocrisy is no respecter of rank. It is one thing to argue policy with reasoned explanations why one policy bodes better for people, directly or indirectly, than another. It is rather another thing to offer platitudes that merely win votes or deflect awkward moments.
Small government rubric, if dealt with honestly, is proven to be sheer and unadulterated balderdash. Yet people eat it up. Honesty and truth flow in unison when arguing that we ought to have as little government as comports with security and opportunity for all (= big government), with as little graft and corruption possible, and with the requisite internal and external accountability. There are no correct or proper or negotiated alternatives to this truth. It is a philosophical absolute. The issue is how to come closest to actualizing this truth. That is the only issue.
This is not to say that Democrats don't push the envelope in numerous ways. But they do not have a nefarious ideology that encourages deceit and ultimates in suffering and diminished opportunity. Republicans select a justification that sounds good, something that a couple or three select pieces of evidence might vouch for. Their supply-side thesis is one such. Examples can be adduced that would admit of a supply-side provenance. Thus you can point to the post-Industrial age in which life got better for the masses, allowing conservatives to assert cause-effect logic and get all then mileage possible before others discover the weakness of the thought experiment. An actual supply-side policy rarely has anything in common with such selections of evidence that are paraded as justification for the policy. Every shred of evidence can be destroyed in similar fashion. Let the isolated incidents have validity, there is precious little verifiability as components of a policy.
One-stop entitlement shopping breeds one-stop scapegoating; what justifies policies also exonerates. If everyone does "the excuse thing', Republicans throw it in your face and rub it in, much like the Hungarian liar who goes on the offensive, hoping to shame the accuser into backing down. An example of the ilk: Past CEO of BB&T (in the ranks of BOA and Wells Fargo) explained the nuts and bolts of the 2008 financial crisis by discounting the obvious by cynically emphasizing the same -- "People want to blame the financial crisis on greed, but in my 40 years there has always been maximum greed on Wall Street." The logic: business as usual cannot, by definition, cause something so potentially catastrophic. In honor-based terms, boys will be boys, so look elsewhere to explain the slide from vandals to burglars to rapists. Clever.
Using the tiny tried-and-true portion of larger truths to explain the entirety of bad policy (the logic of the false synecdoche), the good banker told his banker audience that the four F's (the fed, FDIC, and the two Fannies) were the culprits -- in sympathy with which the audience gave him a standing ovation. When deniability is critical to continued crime, the honor-based crook knows how to stand and clap. That was code for telling the public and the liberals in particular that they don't 'get it'. Throw the accusation back in the face of the accuser. Classic Republican face-saving honor.
Now why in the world are Republicans able to foist these inane propositions as if hatched in heaven? The honor-based enjoy identifying with socially approved authorities. Republicans search out those the citizenry can be counted on to trust, folks like Milton Friedman, who turned the impartial judgments of professional economics into a partisan agenda. Few at the University of Chicago had the balls to call him on it, so that once he had a Nobel he could spit and spew fire with impunity. The school became synonymous with conservative economics bound in political wrap no less than Republican politics was shortly thereafter to wrap itself in religion.
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