Since I've been publishing OpEdNews, and even more, since I ran the OpEdNews.com/ Zogby People's poll, I think a lot about who is a right winger and who is a left winger, how you can tell the difference and why they are what they are.
For me, understanding how and why people would be right wing is very intriguing. I've written enough about how I think these folks have had a bit too much of the koolaid. That was before doing the poll.
Now I have a clearer picture of who right wingers really are. A lot of my suspicions and theories have been somewhat confirmed.
Now I know that we on the left are fighting a battle where a majority of the people on OUR side are women living in big cities. Half the women in my poll are not married. They are single, widowed, divorced or living in a civil union.
56% of progressives, 70% of liberals, and 58% of moderates are women.
61% of Conservatives, 75% of very conservatives and 68% of libertarians are men.
This is a war of the sexes. Democratic women against Republican men. I think it takes a real man to be a Democrat. Me-- I'm a heterosexual male who has never fit in with average "GUYS."
I don't talk sports because spectator sports, outside of the Olympics, bore the hell out of me. I've begun asking my liberal male friends a test question. "Who won the superbowl two years ago.?" Personally, I don't have a clue. I'm just not interested. I can tell you who performed during the halftime break. That's culturally interesting to me. But most of the men I know who are liberals don't have a clue either. The more moderate, less political Democrats will often know the answer.
It's no wonder that the local radio station that plays Limbaugh, Hannity and other right wingers also does the local sports coverage.
I've been saying for years that we need to be recruiting professional athletes into the left's activism, including as politicians. Here in PA, we have pro football player Lynn Swann running for Governor. Jess Ventura didn't do very badly either.
Once you look at politics as a war of the sexes, some patterns become much clearer. It makes sense for the big boys who need to feel macho, machismo, manly, well endowed, sexually superior, etcetera to embrace the pseudo macho talk of George Bush, to embrace the tough American War wager attitude. It makes sense for men who are feeling their masculinity threatened to want to take away women's rights to control their own bodies. It makes sense for these men to want to keep women at home, for ministers of these men to tell husbands to keep their women home, to relegate them to domestic roles. It makes sense for them to attack strong women and to characterize them as overagressive, pushy, or worse, like they do with Hillary.
This right wing culture rejects not just women's rights, but the feminine archetypal ways of being, experiencing, expressing and knowing. This is a form of blinded, impaired, incomplete functioning. It is no wonder that right wing leaders draw their power from fear-- fear of terrorism, fear of homosexuality, fear of expression of emotions. You see, emotional expression is a feminine archetypal characteristic. That doesn't mean it is feminine, or a girlie thing to do. So it is no surprise that right wing media use emotional expressiveness as an excuse to malign and attack liberals who express emotions. Look what they did to Howard Dean's three seconds of enthusiasm. Look at how they take any emotional expression by liberals and reframe it as angry, overemotional, even imbalanced behavior.
The opposite of emotional expression is blocked emotion, a frozen face, a secretive persona. Think Dick Cheney. Ironically, the one emotion that fits with the male persona and that seems particularly popular with right wingers is anger, often, anger associated with self-righteousness and accusation of shame.
Right wingers embrace tough, hard shelled exteriors. They talk compassion, but the emotional values they live by don't allow room for it. They give it intellectual lip-service.
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