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Nate Silver

Moreover, it's not just government that provides these moments in life. Anyone who's ever had to deal with Dell customer service knows that, indeed, there IS a company more desperately terrible than Comcast in this department. Conservatives would say that in theory the market would replace those horrorshow companies, but for anyone who lives in the real world and interacts with American customer service knows that the day when market forces push private sector companies asymptotically toward customer service quality is a future day well after every conservative who holds that belief will have been long dead.

Still, I walked away today, having just been in a sea of conservatives who left me speechless, and thought: this is one tiny example of a major reason people become Republicans. Disgust, anger, annoyance with government interaction (ever wait in line at the DMV?) is distorted within an emotional prism, and suddenly someone is receptive to an anti-government message. What just happened becomes explainable by a larger narrative, and now you have somewhere to channel that disgust. People don't like to have loose disgust. It has to be funneled into a rational and ready explanation, a larger story. It helps a person feel they're regaining control over their environment.

When CPAC attendees gather to glory in their hatred of government, the thing Grover Norquist wants to drown in a bathtub, they are insisting that government is the problem. That it cannot be efficient, and that the side effect is to steal from you (who are good and have earned it) to redistribute to others (who haven't).

That the tone coming out of CPAC is as hard-edged as it has been ("Al Franken and ACORN: How Liberals are Destroying the American Election System"; "Health Care: The Train Wreck Ahead"; "Bailing Out Big Business: Are We All Socialists Now?") reflects this core fear that Democratic control of government means more and more aspects of life will be filled with interactions like this one. A lot of the spinoff spew that takes shape in prejudice behaviors of intolerance derives, I believe, from fear that a force bigger than me is taking from me with no recourse. Prejudice is about looking for targets to blame for the powerlessness.

The way that my belief in the moral force of civil rights is the foundation for why I start as less a Democrat than as an anti-Republican, and much of the rest is built outward from there, many Republicans start with the kernel that government's inherent design is to be inefficient, and to take from your deserving pockets and put it in the pocket of passive-aggressive, government job-having bureaucrats. They, too, build outward from that core belief to the rest of the ideology. It's a zero-sum game where limited resources mean its you or the other guy who wins.

Is this way oversimplified? Of course, there are many paths to the Republican Party. Earth-shattering in insight? Not close, since it doesn't take a genius to point out that conservatives hate government. It's more an idle stream of thought on a Friday afternoon from a stunned-into-silence non-conservative leaving the ultra-conservative CPAC, trying to empathize with how that ideology starts.