Countries and states run by right wing movements tend to be poorer in health, quality of life, safety, security, education and wealth, and many have weak or even moribund economies. Why is it that right wing movements seem peculiarly unable to govern, uniquely unqualified to solve the very problems that their own populations are crying out be alleviated?
Part of the problem is their “solutions.” Let’s get right to some examples.
- A natural disaster strikes. The right wing solution is “if we drive the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet, then God will stop punishing us with tornadoes and hurricanes!”
- An economic crisis hits. The right wing solution is “if we persecute and do away with everyone who doesn’t look like us and believe as we do, then everything will get better!”
- Violent crime is on the rise. The right wing solution is to make the weapons of violence more powerful and more plentiful.
- Violent crime is on the rise. Another right wing solution “we need to put God in schools” — which is sure to teach the next generation to hate people who are different, and would undoubtedly persuade some of them that violence against out-groups is acceptable.
- A city or landmark is hit with a major terrorist attack. The typical right wing solution is “if we persecute and punish all the people we hate, then the terr’ists won’t get so mad at us anymore!“
It’s because right wing priorities have no interest in problem-solving. Right wing governments tend to be consumed by an overarching mission of keeping minority groups under oppression. That is their reason for existence. Any state or national problem that would require real planning and research to solve is most likely far beyond the skill set of government officials know of only one objective: keeping minorities under their thumb.
When your only weapon is a bludgeon of oppression, then everything that goes wrong starts to look like an excuse for MAGA to persecute its scapegoats even more.
Right wing governments similarly tend to be consumed by a compulsion to regulate their citizenry’s sex lives or family lives to an inordinate, arbitrary degree that serves no constructive public interest or public benefit. A government that is hyper-focused on policing its inhabitants’ private parts and bedroom activities has little time, energy, resources, personnel, knowledge, or skill left over for actual problem-solving.
Sexual control of others is one of the crudest drives of many species of primates including ourselves, and right wing governments are the institution of those crude, carnal drives. It is therefore unsurprising that right wing obsession with sexual control leads to the kinds of behavior that benefit from unfettered sexual control over others, as the Hephzibah Girls will testify. It is why MAGA churches have a perversion problem.
Another characteristic of right wing governments is how tightly they cling to the policy equivalent of quack medicine. When a particular quack medicine doesn’t improve a patients condition, the true believer’s only possible response is to increase the dose and/or intensity of the quack cure or quack therapy. A true believer in quack medicine is incapable of considering the possibility that their chosen quack cure does not, in fact, work.
Right wing “cures” for social ills suffer from the same kind of blind, dogged insistence upon their imagined efficacy. While the far Left shares some of the same tendency to double down on failed ideologically driven cures, it’s right wing movements that dig in with their doomed cultural “cures” regardless of the extent of the lasting harm that they cause.
The right wing cure for supposed promiscuity is invariably the imposition of increasingly oppressive, shame and guilt-ridden, fanatical religion. This fails spectacularly, as the nation’s highest rates of teen pregnancy and teen birth rates are found in the deep red Bible Belt states. (To be fair Utah’s rates are actually pretty low. It’s the evangelical states that have the highest teen pregnancy rates. The Latter-Day Saints must be doing something different.)
Get a clue, MAGA: your “cures” do not work. They actually make things worse.
Look around the world (or across the world, for the MAGA out there), and you will find not one country that is both run by oppressive religious dogma and is safe to inhabit. The more oppressive the religious regime, the more dangerous and violent its country becomes, as any cursory survey of eastern Europe and the Middle East will demonstrate.
The more secular and progressive a country is, the safer it becomes.
Right wing “solutions” don’t work because right wing priorities have nothing to do with problem-solving. Right wing movements double down on their own policy failures with an unshakable, implacable devotion to the socioeconomic quack medicine of superstition, xenophobia, and the ever-increasing control of citizens’ lives in ways that bear no relation to any real problems that arise or goals that would give them opportunities to improve the quality of life.