Anyone else seen those ads for home security systems they run on Fox News nearly every commercial break? The ad that has the young-looking housewife whose door is broken down all of a second out of nowhere by some random invader, and then she screams and the security alarm goes off and the dude runs out of the doorway back into the night, and she's safe from the hostile, dangerous world because someone sold her a fancy security system?
I think that really nails the default attitude of the party right now - people who are afraid literally ALL THE TIME of some unforeseeable catastrophe. I know (or used to know) someone like that, always living in the moment when the next terrible thing would happen to her and constantly feeling like a victim over those terrible things which had already happened to her - not capable of recognizing that the overwhelming majority of human lives involve some degree of serious emotional hardship or tragedy, and pretty much living the majority of her life in a moderately afraid state. As a result she was paranoid, hard to deal with, utterly intractable over any disagreement she had with anybody else, and bitterly judgmental (and she watched Fox News all the time).
I really think that the predominant character note behind the party these days, which they try actually fairly successfully to cover over, is chronic, overdeveloped, overreacting fear. I don't even know if *I* have any idea how scared these folks are behind the militaristic and hostile front they're putting up. It can't be easy to live like that.
I also think they're blowing their own damn feet right off. They've managed to raise an entire generation of young people that think that Republicans are warmongering, nasty, financially incompetent and blind to any form of dissent (thank you, George W. Bush). Their supporters aren't getting any younger and young voters went for Obama 2 to 1 in the last election. The only thing that really concerns me about it all is that I'm not very sanguine that some of these folks can psychologically deal with a long period of being on the outs politically. Many of them seem on the edge of completely losing it as it is. If that does indeed come to pass, I worry that many of them will take to genuine violent extremism and uncontrollable anger rather than trying to understand why they've lost the mandate to govern.
