It seems pretty clear at this point that we're dealing with a mass cult-like political movement. Ordinary, symptom-free individuals have become sucked into a worldview that propagates through a perpetual cycle of stoking fear & hatred that then provides answers only it can solve.
I'm not a clinical psychologist, so I don't know where the clinical line between disordered thought begins, but I do know that environmental circumstances of abuse, or religious or cultural isolation can create conditions for disordered thoughts and effectively mild mental psychosis.
In each of these situations, we've come to see first-hand as our collective attempts at reason have fallen on deaf ears, the individual cannot hope to escape their delusions unless they are removed from the environmental contingencies that perpetuate them.
Family, friends, all going to mega churches, consuming only RW media.
 
So what do we do about this? More debate is a ridiculous option. You wouldn't debate someone out of a domestic violence situation or a cult, or drug addiction. Honestly this feels like a desperate attempt to avoid more serious *and effective* solutions - classic centrism!
 
So, no expert here, but what would this be? First, the source. RW media has consolidated a lot across radio & TV. (The Liberal media almost exists to legitimize the RW as 'serious' more than it does hold the powerful to account).
But they also just have an absurd amount of 'dark money' aka private super-wealthy donors to think-tanks and media outreach as well as media productions themselves.  So too large mega churches which spread delusional messages to millions not just in the pews but across radio, TV and the web.
 
So people talk about government regulations on ownership. All for it. Maybe reigning in political speech through churches, but that gets into messy free speech territory. However, honestly these mega churches are sketchy as hell.
 
This is why I'm inclined (per my post earlier today re: Krugman's Oligarch's), to go after the broad base of wealthy conservatives in this country funding the base of the delusional framework for the cult. Because this isn't the work of the .1% or even the 1%. It's the countless car dealership owners, the farm-owners, the manufacturing plant owners, the CEOs, the business leaders, the 'movers and shakers', etc. These are the ones with the most to lose, and who have always found appeals to the old traditionalisms most appealing because they have always been at the top - these are the white Christian heterosexual men who, you know, some of them might have worked hard, or they know a guy who did, but they inherited their wealth and they want their kids to inherit it too. They have a nice house and they want to protect it. Their world has become more and more perfect as they've amassed more and more power.
It's become within fetishizing distance, where the homeless and migrants can now be removed as 'unclean'. Oh, people who are different or who protest can be removed too.
 
Never mind their system leaves people in poverty & broke & homeless & immigration is a mess & the world is a mess & it's become within fetishizing distance, where the homeless and migrants can now be removed as 'unclean'. Oh, people who are different or who protest can be removed too.
 
Never mind their system leaves people in poverty & broke & homeless & immigration is a mess & the world is a mess & people are desperate & washing dishes needs to be done so an immigrant is going to do it and now their favorite police state restaurant is running behind and Fox news is blaming the unions.
 
These people need to be taken down a peg. No one needs $500 million in wealth.  Wouldn't $250 million do?
No one even needs $200 million in wealth.  Seriously.  What would you even do with that? How would you spend it? What would you buy? Wouldn't the first moral calculation be the people in serious distress that you could completely save for $1 million and not even feel it in your wallet?
Which begs the question: What are they feeling in their wallets? What does their wealth do for them? Putting aside  that it is a scientific fact they did not earn and therefore a moral fact they do not deserve* their wealth, I imagine it is security & power - a buffer, a safety in knowing that they are shielded by lawyers, privileges, etc. should anything ever go wrong. Above the law or the vicissitudes of life, essentially.
*no one does but that is another scientific discussion.
OK, we can all relate. But it is a completely selfish and onanistic fantasy, a sort of one-person insurance policy made possible at the expense of everyone else's democracy and human rights to freedom and access to an egalitarian life. Because in hoarding all that wealth, they are denying to all Americans universal health care, equal treatment before the law, fair wages to all low-skilled workers, among many other illiberal schemes.
 
But maybe most of all, they are perpetuating this delusional mirror-world which tells them to go forth and plunder, be cruel, be selfish, as long as it is to protect yourself, your family, and 'traditionalist values' we've passed down for centuries to keep the hierarchies well-oiled and funneling resources and status to the deserving top. And the magical fantasies will keep unspooling to make it all seem ordered and just, a picture of freedom, liberty and justice, & patriotism.
 
 
 

​To say conservatives have been critiquing colleges for a long time is an understatement. It’s kind of been their thing at least since Buckley’s God and Man at Yale in 1951. But the Nazis were doing it with Cultural Bolshevism in the 1920’s, and before anyone claims the Nazis weren’t conservative, just contrast the term with Cultural Marxism of the 1990’s and it’s resurgence with the Alt-right in the 2010’s.
 
You’ve got four main lines of attack, going after each element of what is essentially viewed as an assault on Western Civilization: naive students, corrupting teachers, coddling administrators, and shoddily researched and fallaciously theorized content. The critique hasn’t really changed in a century. The Frankfurt school just turned into Ethnic Studies, which seeped out into every other field, until you finally had things like “woke” math and little Jenny was adding and subtracting Trans pineapples.
 
One might note the profound social changes that occurred over this time period. Labor rights. Civil rights. Feminism. Disability rights. Gay rights. Trans rights. And the incredible amount of research and theorizing that went on in academia across every field. Sure, ethnic studies often led the way in specifically looking at power relations and functional contextualism between systems and institutions of power and marginalized groups, but they drew from sociology, history, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, law, the arts – all splayed out upon the altar of liberal epistemology. The tools of higher order cognitive processes such as comparative analysis, relative framing and synthesis were used in service of perspective-taking and deconstruction. The highest liberal values of critical thought, self-reflection and egalitarianism were turned not outwards against other societies in a tradition of superiority, but inwards towards our own society to ‘lift up’ the previously unseen, unheard and marginalized groups who have always been here but exploited, oppressed and disenfranchised.
 
So what were conservatives doing during all this time, as the decades went on and on? Fighting all of it.  Participating in none of it.  Sure, maybe decades later, when they couldn’t take the social opprobrium anymore – or they simply died off, they finally accepted where new social lines were being drawn.  But they didn’t do any of the research or study, or theorizing.  They maybe took an undergraduate class, argued rigidly and dogmatically with the teacher, and dined out on the aggrieved experience for the rest of their career. Or the conservative professor, a specialist in philosophy, classics or economics maybe, ensconced in their spartan office with their brandy and their photographs of Edmund Burke and Churchill, congratulating himself for his grit in reading the classics in Latin but demonstrating utter sloth in failing to keep up with the rich body of scholarship developing new ways of thinking about its context, his position in reading it, its meaning as a ‘great’ text, etc. 
 
Conservatives don’t really believe in liberal education, one that is so totally committed to liberal values and ways of thought that it is able to question the authority of traditional social hierarchies and dogmas. It is not that they don’t want the students to be naïve (fat chance changing that), or that the professors are teaching them content that isn’t true, and that the administrators are facilitating it. It is that they are being allowed to question and subvert dominant paradigms.  They are asking the uncomfortable questions.  For this they are labeled ‘activists’.
 
We could take conservatives more seriously if they had any project of their own to apply liberal values and thought to traditional social dogmas. It isn’t as if they have already done the work – completed the research, taken the data, developed the theories, collaborated across disciplines, and come to the conclusion that the traditional dogmas were actually correct all along. No, just as is usually the case with religion or any other dogma one is usually born into and accepts without diligently going out and testing against all other dogmas, using multiple methods of analysis, from empiricism to qualitive inference to artistic intuition, it is just assumed to be correct.
 
And they will flat out tell you when pressed, “It’s common sense”. “It’s the natural order of things”. “Everyone knows it to be true.” Etc.
 
A conservative’s role in academia, to the extent we are talking about conservatism, and not just the head-down, work-a-day task of facially field-specific and apolitical study, is to propagandize, perform apologetics, and harbor grievance for conservatism. It is as if someone were to march in to a quiet, peaceful library holding a giant, illiberal golden calf, and proceed to parade around shouting about their own oppression for a hundred years – hoping, of course, to distract as many patrons as possible from their studies so as to keep them from as much power and agency as possible.