NP: Frank Zappa, Live in New York

I'm kind of surprised that I haven't written about this before, but maybe I spelled Nietzsche wrong. Anyway, Steve Benen riffs on another post in the wake of this week's primaries:

Jon Chait explained overnight how this attitude -- the GOP have characterized their efforts as "a twilight struggle to save the last vestiges of the Republic" -- applies to campaign politics.

The premise of all these pleas for [Mike Castle in Delaware's Republican Senate primary] was extremely sensible: this is politics. Sometimes you move the ball forward, sometimes the other team moves it forward. Sometimes you make compromises in order to get ahead.

But the Republican base has been taught not to think this way. This isn't just politics, remember? This is a twilight struggle for freedom. And Mike Castle didn't just cast a couple bad votes. He acquiesced in a sinister plan to undermine capitalism. How could they ever support a candidate like that?

Quite right. These voters have been told by their party not to compromise or settle for partial victories. There's just too much at stake, they're told. Evil forces are trying to take your country away.

Emphasis not mine, but the "evil forces" struck a chord with me, mainly because I have a very sharp memory of one passage from Friedrich Nietzcshe's Beyond Good and Evil that I read back in college. I completely missed the point when I had to write a paper on it, but then it completely made sense when I went back and re-read it off the academic clock.

The idea is that there used to be "good" and "bad," which corresponded mostly to "have" and "have not." At some point, the "have nots" decided this wasn't in their interest, so they decided they would call themselves "good," and those not like them, based on whatever criteria, "evil." I'd have to check, but I'm guessing there was a religious component to this paradigm shift.

That's my recollection of that particular passage, anyway. And if I were to characterize the change in politics over the past two decades or so, it's that the notion of "we're right and you're wrong" has been transformed to "we're righteous and you're sinners," which isn't terribly constructive when it comes to how government is actually supposed to work.

It's probably not a coincidence that this change has coincided with the rise of TV evangelists and preachers like Pat Robertson and Glenn Beck.