This, discovered via Oliver Willis, is why I believe that the extreme right will not continue to dominate the political landscape for long…because everyone has their “enough point” for bullshit…even bullshit they have been carefully primed to buy…and even bullshit they desperately want to believe.

One day, you just find that you’ve had to tie yourself in one too many knots to answer one too many questions and though you might agree with the ruling political ideology on a few points…or even a large number of them, you find that you just don’t belong anymore.

And that is disillusioning.

Which is what I think drove a lot of people to the right in the first place.  I know I swung somewhat to the right during my college years because I was put off by the far left’s obsession with political correctness (which seems good at first, I mean who doesn’t like a little guidance in how to be sensitive to people and world views you don’t understand?) and it’s constantly evolving demands that people adhere to a tighter and tighter ideological doctrine.  (Penn and Teller said it best when they describe PC adherents as “the politeness police”).

I really felt that many of the “issues” near and dear to the heart of the most vocal elements of the radical left were not issues that mattered to the majority of Americans who were traditionally left-leaning.  It seemed that working to ban Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer from school libraries was higher on their priority than raising the national minimum wage, or guaranteeing a healthy social safety net, or national health coverage…or making sure polluters pay fines for the cleanup of their messes.

The early success of people like Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh is that they would say the most repugnant stuff on the radio, and it made people feel good to smirk and scoff at the “wounded puppy” noises made by the PC crowd.

Political conclusion:  Self-righteous sanctimoniousness, and its accompanying demand for complete compliance to an ideological orthodoxy will always backfire eventually.