You’ve definitely heard conservatives (including nearly-conservatives like libertarians) mention how much they hate politics. It’s interesting given that the conservative information bubble is so incredibly political. Conservatives are really soaking in a dense fog of political propaganda which acts as a constant inoculation against any facts they may experience in the larger world.
Moreover, conservatives are more than happy to use the machine of politics to attack (you might even say “cancel”) groups of people that they don’t like. They cancelled trans people by kicking them out of the military, they cancelled Muslims by banning travel from majority-Muslim nations, they cancelled Jewish people by defining Jewishness as a nation (thus separating Jewish people from the American nation), they cancelled immigrants from across our southern border by putting them in concentration camps, they cancelled gay people by saying they shouldn’t be able to marry, and the list just goes on and on. Conservativism is politics — heavily armed politics — so you literally can’t be conservative without being political.
Recently, I saw a conservative define totalitarianism as a society in which everything is politicized, and you cannot escape politics. That seemed really weird to me because, in reality, everything is political anyway, so “escaping politics” isn’t something you can achieve without literally leaving society — and eventually, society will catch up with you. Conservatives aren’t planning to leave society, so what is it that they’re really trying to escape?
I think I’ve figured it out.
Conservatives often say they don’t want to talk about politics — especially with family, friends or coworkers. It’s because if they talk about politics, they’re going to say something intensely disrespectful to some group of people, and they will have to face criticism.
Conservatives say that they hate political correctness. Political correctness is just treating people respectfully — especially in terms of whatever groups they belong to. They hate political correctness because they don’t want to be criticized for being disrespectful to people.
Conservatives say that there is reverse racism, but on closer inspection, racism involves people being seriously harmed — even killed — while “reverse racism” just involves people being criticized for being disrespectful or even harmful to other people.
Conservatives say that the social justice movement divides people based on race. It’s an interesting claim given that racists are the ones claiming that there are significant differences between these made-up races, while the social justice movement is trying to correct the harm caused by those claims. But what they really mean is that bringing up racism is divisive — it creates conflict — and the conflict that they don’t want is criticism of their own racism.
The real definition of totalitarianism is “a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state” not “a society in which everything is politicized, and you cannot escape politics”. However, we’ve got to try to understand what conservatives are talking about, and the way to do that is to replace “politics” with accountability. If we do that, then we learn that conservatives think it is totalitarianism if they are held accountable for their treatment of other people. In contrast, they think freedom is when they are not held accountable for their treatment of other people.
And of course they don’t really mean “totalitarianism” — they mean oppression. So, the real statement is “oppression is whenever I am held accountable for my treatment of other people, especially if I cannot escape accountability”. Conservatives don’t hate politics — they love politics! What they hate is accountability.
What’s another general group of people that hate accountability? Narcissists would be one. Let’s see if there are any similarities.
Here are 7 Tactics Narcissists Use to Escape Accountability:
1. Intimidate/Blame: Bullying the person trying to hold them accountable and trying to make the conflict the other person’s fault; e.g., “BLM is so divisive.”
2. Accuse/Project: This is the Peewee Herman Defense; “I know you are, but what am I?” They accuse the accuser of the very thing that they themselves did… including accusing the accuser of projection.
3. Argue/Exhaust: Instead of sincerely engaging, they choose small (less important) details, and argue them to death, creating such a flood of irrelevant bullshit that it wears out the accuser. This is also called the Gish gallop. If you’ve started out talking about how Medicaid for All would help small businesses but now you’re having to do a deep dive on the ideology and methods of the Bolsheviks, that’s what happened.
4. Deny/Rewrite: Outright denying reality; gaslighting. That would be QAnon, but also the entire narrative about “socialism” that conservatives obsess over, and, of course, the conservative version of US history.
5. Divert/Attack: This would be an outburst over a minor (generally misconstrued) detail that then becomes a major focus of attack. You’ve seen this as them taking something someone said in a completely incorrect way, and then spending months talking about that and only that like it’s the end of the world. For example, Hillary Clinton said (fairly accurately) that half of Trump supporters were deplorables (i.e., racists, fascists and other villains); somehow that became a years-long yowling about how Democrats think all Republicans are deplorables, including merch like t-shirts and morale patches referring to Clinton’s terrible, terrible criticism.
6. Fear/Avoid: Spinning a terrifying tall tale which makes someone else fearful, and then denying responsibility for their fear — like how conservative leaders told conservatives that their democracy had been stolen by Satanic, pedophilic socialists, and then denied responsibility for the January 6 insurrection.
7. Rescue/Retreat: Narcissists gain loyalty by creating the impression of having saved you. Once they’ve convinced you that you need them, they threaten to abandon you, and use that threat as leverage to avoid responsibility for their bad behavior. As an example, the police are always talking about how much they’ve saved the community from violent crime (which isn’t accurate at all) and then when they commit an atrocity, they threaten to withhold their protection; that tactic is meant to manipulate the community into obedience.
Conservatives — and narcissists — hate accountability. Interestingly, an old conservative meme is “personal responsibility” which is basically identical to accountability. Again, it’s clear now that this was bullshit. It was just meant as more sophisticated way to blame the victim. (Personal responsibility can have a more pro-active connotation, but is always brought up in terms of what a person should have done to avoid their current predicament.) When we try to get a conservative to take personal responsibility for their bad behavior, we get a flurry of the above tactics (and more) so they can avoid accountability.
Here, for no particular reason, is a list of narcissists greatest fears. I’ll point you to one specific quote in that article:
Ensconced in spinning a version of reality most favorable to them, narcissists tend to lie and misrepresent so readily that they become convinced that whatever they utter in the moment is true and right. To many around them, such conviction can be persuasive unless you spot the underlying man-behind-the-curtain dynamic.
I don’t think it is helpful to start accusing conservatives of being narcissists. That’s just falling into a trap where they pretend to be the victim, and lead you down a rabbit hole of Peewee Herman arguments. I would even go so far as to say that they want to be attacked, because that verifies their narrative of conservative victimhood. Instead, the answer is to recognize this problem for what it is and approach it in the same way you might approach the problem of having a narcissist in your life.