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Kevin Drum of Mother Jones passes on a tidbit that helps make sense of the peculiar, even egregious mindset of the largely dominant classes.

TALK RADIO....Via Digby, here is Dan Shelley, former news director and assistant program director at Milwaukee’s WTMJ, telling us about his career working with his station’s right-wing talkers:

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

He quoted it here.

Got that? However on top or in charge they might be they generally don’t feel that way. For instance…

The stereotyped liberal view of the talk radio audience is that it’s a lot of angry, uneducated white men. In fact, the audience is far more diverse. Many are businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, academics, clergy, or soccer moms and dads. Talk show fans are not stupid. They will detect an obvious phony. The best hosts sincerely believe everything they say. Their passion is real. Their arguments have been carefully crafted in a manner they know will be meaningful to the audience, and that validates the views these folks were already thinking.

That doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous either

[The] enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast.

Sometimes, it can even be their own station’s news director. One year, Charlie targeted me because I had instructed my midday news anchor to report the Wimbledon tennis results, even though the matches wouldn’t be telecast until much later in the day. Charlie gave out my phone number and e-mail address on the air. I was flooded with hate mail, nasty messages, and even one death threat from a federal law enforcement agent whom I knew to be a big Charlie fan.

And here comes the first crux, applied by Shelley to ‘winger talk-show hosts but applicable to all such members of the “superior” class

This brings us to perhaps the most ironic thing about most talk show hosts. Though they may savage politicians and others they oppose, they fear criticism or critiques of any kind.

And then the final, dangerous irony

It is foolish to enter into a dispute with someone who has a 50,000-watt radio transmitter at his or her disposal and feels cornered.

Thing is, the people with their hands on very real levers of power are dangerous not because they’re ubermensch harboring Nietchziean beliefs that the weak exist merely for the amusement and exploitation of the strong. They’re dangerous because they imagine themselves at the bottom of the heap, only one law, one regulation, one immigrant, one heterosexual proposition declined, one homosexual proposition tolerated, one woman’s promotion, one foreign competitor, one adherent to another religion, away from social, cultural, even physical annihilation.

I remember sitting in the lobby of a progressive Portland, OR, publisher’s office back in 1980 or 1981, waiting for a friend to conclude a meeting, and reading a report (of all things) about volunteer burnout in progressive organizations. The article cited another study about anxiety among white-collar workers. Allegedly more than 75% of all white-collar workers surveyed in this cited studies believed there was some single question that could be asked that, by their inability to answer, would reveal them as frauds and cost them their jobs. Seventy-five percent!

And yet, even by the lax standards of the 1970s, dominated by the Peter Principle that everyone rises to their level of incompetence** and by stagflation and chronic layoffs, it simply wasn’t the case that everyone was separated from the street by only a single question.

That’s just what people… still mostly men back then… believed. Of themselves far more than of others. Remember, the fear was, and I think is, real. The basis for that fear was not.

Again, that doesn’t make that illusory fear less dangerous. Remember, death threats for publishing tennis scores! Just as today you see immigrants, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, murdered by cowards goaded by a culture of cowardice. Just as you see unassuming Unitarian churchgoers murdered in their pews not like cornered rats but by self-imagined cornered rats, goaded in turn by those who imagine themselves just as cornered.

I mention all this not as some kind of call for compassion (which would be received only as condescension anyway) but as an admonition to understand the peculiar mechanics of contemporary oppression, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, homo- and transphobia in order to more effectively address it rather than exacerbate it, to mitigate it instead of magnify it.

[** Not as harsh as it was made out to be: restated more generously, you’d keep getting promoted until you reached, or barely exceeded, your full competency — in other words till you reached a maximum, not optimum, equilibrium of skill and workload. Naturally nobody saw it that way. —fl]