Scholar Mary Beard talks about how historians try to normalize the ancient Romans. We try to make them more like ourselves when in fact they were anything but like us. We watch football on Sundays the Romans slaughtered 60,000 animals for spectators during the first month that the Coliseum was open.
We today do the same thing with conservatives. We normalize them. Ronald Reagan wasn’t a kook who believed in crank economics that would trickle down wealth from the rich to the poor he was an affable cowboy who could shoot out snappy one liners.
We could say the same thing about Bush Jr., he wasn’t a dry drunk juiced up on Jesus, he was a simple Texas oilman who liked baseball.
The same goes for Rick Perry. He didn’t try to take Texas out of the United States of America risking a second civil war that would have left far more dead than the 600,000 killed in the first one. He was a straight talking “job creator.” Never mind it was pay to play and he would be in jail if it happened in any other state.
Take a look at Michele Bachmann. She isn’t a notorious homophobe who believes vaccines turn teenage girls into “mental retards,” she is a common citizen who can galvanize grassroots citizens to fight big spending and high taxes that crush the little guy.
Then you have Sarah Palin who shoots animals in cold blood for TV cameras and doesn’t read newspapers but she is really a soccer mom.
You get the picture it is ridiculous to normalize that which is abnormal. We can’t make ancient Romans into nice gentle people and the same holds true for conservatives. A wacko is a wacko by any other name in the end.