How crazy are the Obama resistors?

[-Mercury-]

they're using the same playbook that they've been using for at least the last half century!

[praktik]

Yep. Except this time the conservatives speaking out against their irrationality are relegated to the sidelines (witness the ubiquitous "RINO" - Republican In Name Only meme) and the Republican leadership is either onboard, or scared to death of criticizing the teabaggers for the certain wrath of the Limbaugh/Hannity/Malkin/Coulter/Horowitz/Savage/Beck nexus.

The 60s permutation of this paranoid strain of American politics was relegated to the fringe by the conservative movement itself - Buckley, Reagan, John Tower - they distanced themselves from them because they did not want to be discredited by association.

It was a young conservative movement and intellectually vibrant. After decades of stagnation and the corrupting influence of holding power - we're left with the Manichaean yahoos protected by both political leadership and potent media organs that play to their worst fears.

[judge wopner]

Originally Posted by praktik

I don't equate the two because I am intelligent enough to understand that the violence is eminating from a tiny minority - but at the same time, the vehemence of the rhetoric coming from the right nearly ensures that the most unstable individuals will use it as en excuse to justify their act of violence.

i know you are, as are most on this board, im asking more in a hypothetical sense.

yes there is very strong rhetoric coming from the right of varous stripes. i am pro free speech but also agree w/ basic criminal laws that state if you make calls for violence against a person, persons or specific event, or facilitate logistical support for such acts you should be prosecuted.

the most unstable people in any society are prey to strong rhetoric, short of enforcing the laws ive mentioned above i wouldnt be in a position to suggest we should stifle the rest of the rhetoric because of the potential emotional-spark plugs that might take it too far. such people unfortunately always exist and will often times turn to violence. as ive said, i think we are too concerned with their claimed ideologies than the fact that clearly a person who walks into a museum and starts shooting is not in any tangible way related to what say the teabaggers were inspired by. (when 1 in 1 million take the same message to the extreme of murder, id say we arent dealing with a faulty message but a faulty social safety net that doesnt get people like this help before they snap)

Originally Posted by praktik

This is the mind of the proto-fascist: the country is in serious danger from an identifiably element within. To gain the "rebirth" of the country, to "restore" it - action must be taken.

You seem to be arguing against someone who is saying that all resistance to Obama at the tea parties is racist and/or potentially violent. I have said no such thing, because it would be silly and innacurate.

true, though i think others have implied that (as noted in the Jimmy carter thread) much greater levels of the opposition is based in racism than i think is actually true. the origin of much of this debate surrounds the way in which the opposition is presented: citations of a single extreme event such as a man showing up w/ a gun, then broad strokes about the other %99.9 who did nothing more than attend a protest with stupid signs.

i view their protests the same way i view the protest of the left over everything GWB ever did. to me its the same as both sides claim its different for them. people are protesting health care in anticipation of changes, the same way people protested the war in iraq before the invasion took place.

Originally Posted by praktik

Ok then. So rhetoric about liberals Destroying the Country plays no role.

Just like Islam plays no role in honour killings I guess right?

its more nuanced than that. i think radical interpretations of islam play a role. but i see these as having nothing to really do with Islam. the same way i dont really see the connection b/w having gone to catholic school as a kid and Jimmy Swaggart's scandals. both are christian but are different animals all together. what i object to is that unfortunately and if you look back at old tribe threads during such debates, there are many otherwise bright people who take the view that it has nothing to do with religion, and suggesting such is racism. even though the conservative angle of blaming "Islam" probally is, theres more grey to be considered. its that absolute approach that tends to put a bee in my bonnet.

in the case here we have rush Limbaugh cited along side radial KKK networks inspiring men to enter museums and commit mass murder. i think thats pushing the bounds, and is in effect like blaming a radical imam of a local toronto mosque AND Alqeda in the same bundle when an honour killing happens in toronto; its a figure known to be extreme up against a figure that goes well beyond. see what im getting at here? i dont see KKK groups or neo-nazi groups as right/left (never mind that nazis were in effect an outgrowth of disgruntled socialists with oxy-moronic fascist and socialist policies at their core)

if we even accept that such super extreme groups play a definitive role via illegal calls to arms and support for violent action, i dont see the link to the right wing that inspires tea baggers and the like.

Originally Posted by praktik

There has been an increase, by 400%, of threats of violence against Obama.

I already showed you the report about rising violence against immigrants, which includes acts of violence.

Obama's election spawned a few violent attacks which I listed above.

I think there is a rational basis for claiming that the current environment differs from the environment of even two years ago. That the potential for more violence is real, and that current events bear this claim out.

ive argued that i dont see an increase in political violence.
threats are separate.

i dont see current events bearing out that violence is more real. we had protests in the tens of thousands all the time against GWB, there was at least 1 death and several violent protests during the G8 (or was it G7 or G20) summits a few years back.

i think there is an increase in perceived threats. is america a more violent place since obama has been elected? i dont see that playing out.

Originally Posted by praktik

No I do not consider the war in yugoslavia to be representative of Europeans in general, just as I do not consider the acts of violence I have listed here as representative of all conservatives, or even of all teabaggers.

But what the ethnic-cleansing in the former Yugoslavia DOES have in common with the current environment of the far-right is the following

• An identification of an "other" within the country that is said to represent a serious threat to the nation.
• Political leadership that subscribes to these ideas (Bachman, Demint, and others on the Limbaugh wing)

Will we see "ethnic cleansing" in America? Or a violent purge of liberals? Of course not. American society is not completely in the grips of this rhetoric, only the Limbaugh right and they are a minority, if a loud one. But we will see more and more people who respond to this rhetoric of the "other" taking these ideas to the logical extreme.

we will have to see. this is a whole other thread.

Originally Posted by praktik

I was referring to Oklahoma.

yes, my mistake, i just saw : 9/11 and "right wing" and had to start the LOL'ers..

[praktik]

Hmmmm:

Some parents in a New Jersey school district are up in arms after a class of elementary school students was videotaped singing the praises of President Obama, an activity that has been criticized as "indoctrination."

The tension at B. Bernice Young Elementary School escalated to such a degree Thursday that the school was placed temporarily on lockdown after its principal received death threats over a YouTube video that showed nearly 20 children being taught songs lauding the president, though back-to-school night events continuing as planned Thursday night at the school.

[praktik]

Update on census worker:

BIG CREEK, Ky. -- A part-time census worker found hanging in a rural Kentucky cemetery was naked, gagged and had his hands and feet bound with duct tape, said an Ohio man who discovered the body two weeks ago.

Jerry Weaver of Fairfield, Ohio, told The Associated Press on Friday that he was among a group of relatives who discovered the body of 51-year-old Bill Sparkman on Sept. 12.

"The only thing he had on was a pair of socks," Weaver said. "And they had duct-taped his hands, his wrists. He had duct tape over his eyes, and they gagged him with a red rag or something.

"And they even had duct tape around his neck. And they had like his identification tag on his neck. They had it duct-taped to the side of his neck, on the right side, almost on his right shoulder."

...Coroner Jim Trosper has said the word "fed" was written on Sparkman's chest with what was likely a felt-tip pen.

...Rudzinsky said investigators hadn't yet determined whether the death was a homicide, suicide or accidental.

[praktik]

Obama - ENEMY OF HUMANITY!!

spoken by a sitting congressmen no less:

[praktik]

Yet another example of extremist right wing incitement against the president. This was too extreme even for Newsmax, so they pulled it.

-----

Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention

By: John L. Perry

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

# Officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."

# Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.

# They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

# They can see that the economy -- ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation -- is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.

# They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.

# They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America's troop strength is allowed to sag.

# They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.

# They can see the nation's safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.

So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?

Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?

Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran's nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, "I'm not interested in victory") that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse?

Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?

Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America's military leadership is lost in a fool's fog.

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

Here's Newsmax's statement trying to distance themselves from this guy:

In a statement sent to TPM, Newsmax spokeswoman Paula Pradines said that John L. Perry -- the columnist who claimed a military coup to "resolve the Obama problem" was increasingly possible -- is just an "unpaid blogger" for the magazine.

"He has no official relationship with Newsmax other than as an unpaid blogger," she said.

On his Newsmax bio page, Perry is described as someone who "contributes a regular column to Newsmax.com." On the site's "Blogs" page, he's listed alongside other contributors including Ben Stein, Grover Norquist and Christopher Ruddy, the owner and editor-in-chief on Newsmax.

He has also written a column nearly every week since late 1999.

Pradines said Newsmax pulled the column after several reader complaints "to insure that this article was not misinterpreted."

"Newsmax strongly believes in the principles of Constitutional government," she added, "and would never advocate or insinuate any suggestion of an activity that would undermine our democracy or democratic institutions."

Besides, Perry "clearly stated that he was not advocating such a scenario but simply describing one," she wrote.

[praktik]

Man oh man. Its like the rhetoric has been stuck on EXTREME for the last 8 years and that the right-wing is too afraid of describing things in a non-extreme way. Latest example of irresponsible rhetoric:

[Boss Hog]

That's pretty funny how readily they'll throw a word like treason around considering how Cheney shredded the constitution, falsified the means for war.... ah fuck it.

[praktik]

ya and a commenter brought up a good point.

Hey jonny come lately - you're concerned about Industrial America? Then why were you OUTRAGED at the auto bailouts? Where were you during the years of free trade but front and center, mouthing platitudes about the glories of the free market??

puh-LEASE!

[praktik]

Why Right-Wing Demagogues Are Tying to Peddle Ludicrous Conspiracy Theories

By Chip Berlet, Indypendent
Posted on October 1, 2009, Printed on October 1, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143007/

Even before Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, the internet was seething with lurid conspiracy theories exposing his alleged subversion and treachery.

Among the many false claims: Obama was a secret Muslim; he was not a native U.S. citizen and his election as president should be overturned; he was a tool of the New World Order in a plot to merge the government of the United States into a North American union with Mexico and Canada.

Within hours of Obama’s inauguration, claims circulated that Obama was not really president because Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts scrambled the words as he administered the oath of office. A few days after the inauguration came a warning that Obama planned to impose martial law and collect all guns.

Many of these false claims recall those floated by right-wing conspiracy theorists in the armed citizens’ militia movement during the Clinton administration — allegations that percolated up through the media and were utilized by Republican political operatives to hobble the legislative agenda of the Democratic Party.

The conspiracy theory attacks on Clinton bogged down the entire government. Legislation became stuck in congressional committees, appointments to federal posts dwindled and positions remained unfilled, almost paralyzing some agencies and seriously hampering the federal courts.

A similar scenario is already hobbling the work of the Obama administration. The histrionics at congressional town hall meetings and conservative rallies is not simply craziness — it is part of an effective right-wing campaign based on scare tactics that have resonated throughout U.S. history among a white middle class fearful of alien ideas, people of color and immigrants.

Unable to block the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, the right-wing media demagogues, corporate political operatives, Christian right theocrats, and economic libertarians have targeted healthcare reform and succeeded in sidetracking the public option and single-payer proposals.

A talented environmental adviser to the Obama administration, Van Jones, was hounded into resigning Sept. 5 by a McCarthyite campaign of red-baiting and hyperbole. Support for major labor law reform has been eroding.

With a wink and a nod, right-wing apparatchiks are networking with the apocalyptic Christian right and resurgent armed militias — a volatile mix of movements awash in conspiracy theories. Scratch the surface and you find people peddling bogus conspiracy theories about liberal secular humanists, collectivist labor bosses, Muslim terrorists, Jewish cabals, homosexual child molesters and murderous abortionists.

This right-wing campaign is about scapegoating bogus targets by using conspiracy theories to distract attention from insurance companies who are the real culprits behind escalating healthcare costs.

Examples of right-wing conspiracy theories include the false claim that healthcare reform will include government bureaucrat “Death Panels” pulling the plug on grandma. Another is the claim that Obama is appointing unconstitutional project “Czars” More fraudulent conspiracy theories are being generated every week.

The core narrative of many popular conspiracy theories is that “the people” are held down by a conspiracy of wealthy secret elites manipulating a vast legion of corrupt politicians, mendacious journalists, propagandizing schoolteachers, nefarious bankers and hidden subversive cadres.

This is not an expression of a healthy political skepticism about state power or legitimate calls for reform or radical challenges to government or corporate abuses. This is an irrational anxiety that pictures the world as governed by powerful long-standing covert conspiracies of evildoers who control politics, the economy, and all of history. Scholars call this worldview “conspiracism.”

The term conspiracism, according to historian Frank P. Mintz, denotes a “belief in the primacy of conspiracies in the unfolding of history.” Mintz explains: “Conspiracism serves the needs of diverse political and social groups in America and elsewhere. It identifies elites, blames them for economic and social catastrophes, and assumes that things will be better once popular action can remove them from positions of power. As such, conspiracy theories do not typify a particular epoch or ideology.”

When conspiracism becomes a mass phenomenon, persons seeking to protect the nation from the alleged conspiracy create counter movements to halt the subversion. Historians dub them countersubversives.

The resulting right-wing populist conspiracy theories point upward toward “parasitic elites” seen as promoting collectivist and socialist schemes leading to tyranny. At the same time, the counter-subversives point downward toward the “undeserving poor” who are seen as lazy and sinful and being riled up by subversive community organizers. Sound familiar?

Right-wing demagogues reach out to this supposedly beleaguered white middle class of “producers” and encourage them to see themselves as being inexorably squeezed by parasitic traitors above and below. The rage is directed upwards against a caricature of the conspiratorial “faceless bureaucrats,” “banksters” and “plutocrats” rather than challenging an unfair economic system run on behalf of the wealthy and corporate interests. The attacks and oppression generated by this populist white rage, however, is painfully felt by people lower on the socio-economic ladder, and historically this has been people of color, immigrants and other marginalized groups.

It is this overarching counter-subversive conspiracy theory that has mobilized so many people; and the clueless Democrats have been caught unaware by the tactics of right-wing populism used successfully for the last 100 years and chronicled by dozens of authors.

The techniques for mobilizing countersubversive right-wing populists include “tools of fear”: dualism, demonization, scapegoating, and apocalyptic aggression.

When these are blended with conspiracy theories about elite and lazy parasites, the combination is toxic to democracy.

DUALISM

Dualism is simply the tendency to see the world in a binary model in which the forces of absolute good are struggling against the forces of absolute evil. This can be cast in religious or secular story lines or “narratives.”

SCAPEGOATING

Scapegoating involves wrongly stereotyping a person or group of people as sharing negative traits and blaming them for societal problems, while the primary source of the problem (if it is real) is overlooked or absolved of blame. Scapegoating can become a mass phenomenon when a social or political movement does the stereotyping. It is easier to scapegoat a group if it is first demonized.

DEMONIZATION

Demonization is a process through which people target individuals or groups as the embodiment of evil, turning individuals in scapegoated groups into an undifferentiated, faceless force threatening the idealized community. The sequence moves from denigration to dehumanization to demonization, and each step generates an increasing level of hatred of the objectified and scapegoated “Other.”

One way to demonize a target group is to claim that the scapegoated group is plotting against the public good. This often involves demagogic appeals.

CONSPIRACISM

Conspiracism frames demonized enemies “as part of a vast insidious plot against the common good, while it valorizes the scapegoater as a hero for sounding the alarm.” Conspiracist thinking can move easily from the margins to the mainstream, as has happened repeatedly in the United States. Several scholars have argued that historic and contemporary conspiracism, especially the apocalyptic form, is a more widely shared worldview in the United States than in most other industrialized countries.

Conspiracism gains a mass following in times of social, cultural, economic, or political stress. The issues of immigration, demands for racial or gender equality, gay rights, power struggles between nations, wars — all can be viewed through a conspiracist lens.

Historian Richard Hofstadter established the leading analytical framework in the 1960s for studying conspiracism in public settings in his essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” He identified “the central preconception” of the paranoid style as a belief in the “existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.”

According to Hofstadter, this was common in certain figures in the political right, and was accompanied with a “sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic” which “goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.”

According to Michael Barkun, professor of political science at Syracuse University, conspiracism attracts people because conspiracy theorists “claim to explain what others can’t. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing.” There is an appealing simplicity in dividing the world sharply into good and bad and tracing “all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents.”

COVER OBAMA’S BACK, BUT KICK HIS BUTT

Today, when you hear the right-wing demagogues whipping up the anti-Obama frenzy, you now know they are speaking a coded language that traces back to Social Darwinist defenses of “Free Market” capitalism and to xenophobic white supremacy. The voices of Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, Dobbs and their allies are singing a new melody using old right-wing populist lyrics. The damage they can do is great even if most of these movements eventually collapse.

The centrist Democratic spinmeisters surrounding Obama have no idea how to organize a grassroots defense of healthcare reform. That’s pathetic.

These are the three R’s of civil society: Rebut, Rebuke, Re-Affirm: Rebut false and misleading statements and beliefs without name-calling; rebuke those national figures spreading misinformation; and re-affirm strong and clear arguments to defend goals and proposed programs.

That’s exactly what President Obama did on in his nationally televised address Sept. 9.

While keeping our eyes on the prize of universal, quality healthcare, we must also prevent right-wing populism as a social movement from spinning out of control. Since Obama’s inauguration, there have been nine murders tied to white supremacist ideology laced with conspiracy theories. It is already happening here.

Since centrist Democrats are selling us out, it is time for labor and community organizers to turn up the heat. We should defend Obama against the vicious and racist attacks from the reactionary political right, but we can have Obama’s back while we are kicking his butt.

Vigorous social movements pull political movements and politicians in their direction — not the other way around. We need to raise some hell in the streets and in the suites.


Chip Bertlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates based near Boston, is editor of the recent book, Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash (South End Press), from which this article was drawn.

[atbell]

Originally Posted by Boss Hog

.... ah fuck it.

Your argument is strong and I can feel myself bending to your views...

[Boss Hog]

well, Tribe is a breeding ground for debate and intellect.

[atbell]

Originally Posted by Boss Hog

well, Tribe is a breeding ground for debate and intellect.

he he he ... you said breeding

[praktik]

The New York Review of Books takes on the issue of the Teabaggers in a thoughtful article. Most useful perhaps is the detail on the corporate connections behind the movement, which I will reprint here but you can click here to see the whole thing.

---------

Something New on the Mall
By Michael Tomasky

issue of Oct 22nd, 2009

We have never seen, at least in the modern history of the United States, a right-wing street-protest movement. Conservatives who oppose Roe v. Wade march on Washington every January 22, the anniversary of that 1973 decision; but aside from that single issue and that single day, the American right over recent decades has, until this summer, carried out its organizing in a comparatively quiet fashion, via mimeograph machine and pamphlet and book and e-mail and text message, and left the streets to the left.

So we have something new in our political life—the summer's apoplectic and bordering-on-violent town-hall meetings, and the large "9/12" rally on Washington's National Mall that drew tens of thousands of people to protest America's descent into "socialism" (or "communism," or, occasionally, "Nazism"). How extreme is this movement, and how seriously should we take it?

...

The Tea Party movement started in February, during the debates over the stimulus bill and the bank bailout. The right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin was among the early agitators for protest. But all remained inchoate until February 19, when CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli delivered what has become famous in some circles as the "Santelli rant." Santelli is a former Chicago trader who joined CNBC in 1999. During one of his regular reports from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, reacting to an earlier on-air segment about the Obama administration's $75 billion plan to help several million homeowners avoid foreclosure, Santelli—who called himself an "Ayn Rander"—erupted:

The government is promoting bad behavior.... I'll tell you what, I have an idea.

You know, the new administration's big on computers and technology—how about this, President and new administration? Why don't you put up a Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?

As he carried on, the traders who normally serve only as his backdrop began to turn, face him, and cheer. He asked them how many of them "want to pay for your neighbors' mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills?" They booed loudly—not at him, but at the idea. He announced plans for a "Chicago Tea Party" for July (whether he did this spontaneously or not is an interesting question[3]). Thus was born the current grassroots movement, on a stock-trading floor ("This is America!" he roared at one point, gesturing toward the traders around him as if they were representative of average folk) and animated by anger at "the losers" and their mortgages.

Within hours, Web sites started popping up. FreedomWorks, a conservative lobbying organization founded in 1984 with a current budget of undisclosed millions (its most recent report to the IRS covers 2007), helped support this activity from the start. It is funded in part by Steve Forbes and headed by former Republican Congressman Dick Armey of Texas, who was a featured speaker at the September 12 rally. FreedomWorks has a history of setting up "astroturf" groups, so named because they resemble grassroots organizations but in fact have significant hidden corporate backing, on a range of issues.

While President Bush was trying to promote Social Security privatization, a woman in Iowa who identified herself as a "single mom" won a coveted spot on the stage from which she praised Bush's plan. It was later revealed that she was FreedomWorks's Iowa state director. She had spent the previous two years as spokeswoman for something called For Our Grandchildren, a pro-privatization group that is itself, according to SourceWatch, the nonprofit monitoring Web site, an offshoot of another group, the American Institute for Full Employment (an outfit advocating reform of welfare that was funded initially by a multimillionaire in Klamath Falls, Oregon, who made his fortune in doors, windows, and millwork).

I mention all this because it suggests how astroturfing works. An existing nonprofit group sets up an ad hoc one devoted to a particular cause or idea. It is given an otherwise good-sounding name, and is presented as having sprung up spontaneously. But always, there is corporate money behind it, donated by rich conservatives who have the sense to see that an image of broad populist anger will be more convincing to the unpersuaded (and to the press) than an image of a corporate titan pursuing a narrow and naked interest.

With respect to the Tea Parties and especially the summer's town-hall meetings, a key corporate titan appears to be Koch Industries of Wichita, Kansas. Fred Koch (pronounced "coke") founded the company in 1940 as an oil business but it has expanded into natural gas, pharmaceuticals, fertilizer, and many other areas. He helped create the John Birch Society in the late 1950s and died in 1967. His two sons who run the business now, David and Charles, have foundations that donate millions to conservative and libertarian causes and groups, including notably the Cato Institute. One Koch-funded group used to be called Citizens for a Sound Economy. It became Americans for Prosperity (AFP) in 2003, a group that has advocated limited government and opposed climate change legislation. Earlier this year, Americans for Prosperity launched a Web site called Patients United Now, which ran frightening television ads opposing health care reform (showing, for example, a Canadian woman who supposedly couldn't get treatment for a brain tumor in her native country[4]). According to the liberal Web site ThinkProgress, the AFP helped distribute signs and talking points at a town-hall event hosted by Virginia Congressman Tom Perriello.

Think Progress is one of three organizations that did extensive reporting over the summer on how the town halls were organized. Media Matters for America, the group run by David Brock, set up a comprehensive Web site, now publicly available, that tracks the complex relationships between donors, nonprofit groups, and the activist organizations to which they funnel money.[5] Campaign for America's Future, the labor-funded advocacy group that's been trying to keep a public option in the final health care bill, produced a helpful flow chart laying out the connections.[6]

The sources of money can be hard to track. These are mainly 501(c)4 groups, which are allowed to lobby and engage in political activity. They are like 501(c)3 groups, which are supposed to be purely educational, in that groups in both categories do not pay federal taxes. However, (c)3 donations are tax-deductible for the donor, while (c)4 gifts are not. The groups have to file annual reports listing major donors, but the fines for late filing are so light that many groups prefer to pay the fines, or file extensions, thus putting off disclosure for months or years.

It isn't just conservative (c)4 groups that backed the town halls. America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, is the enormous lobbying organization for private health insurance companies headed by Karen Ignagni, who makes frequent television appearances discussing health care. According to ThinkProgress's Lee Fang, AHIP mobilized 50,000 of its employees to attend town-hall meetings and otherwise lobby against the inclusion of a public health insurance option in the reform.[7] AHIP's effort was coordinated by Democracy Data & Communications (DDC), which has helped various corporate clients set up front groups. DDC is headed by B.R. McConnon, who was once an employee of the Koch-funded Citizens for a Sound Economy.

Not everything is hidden under such layers. The Web site for the September 12 march, for example, lists its sponsors on its home page (first among them: FreedomWorks Foundation). And the high-powered operations of these groups do not mean that none of the opposition to Obama's policies is genuine and spontaneous. Liberal and conservative bloggers have sparred over this question, the former tending to overstate the control that astroturf groups have over people, the latter tending to deny it completely.

The argument over spontaneity versus coordination largely misses the point, which is the way that a loose network of groups sustains and encourages opposition to the administration and gives the movement currency and power it would not otherwise have. Money is the ultimate lubricant of politics, and the potential money supply for Tea Parties and other astroturf contributions is virtually limitless. In this case, though, it may not be the most important force contributing to the rise of this movement.

...

The third source of support for this movement is Republican elected officials. Thanks in part to millions of dollars of donations to Republican senators like Charles Grassley and Mike Enzi, the Tea Party movement can count on virtually every Republican in Congress to vote with it on major bills. Only Maine Senator Olympia Snowe seems not to bother with them much, which is one reason why she might yet vote with the Democrats on health care. (She has made her opposition to the public option clear, but she did on September 17 sign a letter with three Democrats indicating that she might back a bill without one.) This, again, is a situation without precedent. When the labor or anti–Vietnam War or civil rights movements held their marches, they knew they still faced a battle within Congress to win over a broad majority of Democrats. Within today's congressional Republican Party there is little or no such tension.

This is hardly surprising, given the increasing homogeneity of the GOP in recent decades, as most moderates from New England and elsewhere have left the party. But it is striking to see elected officials staying silent in the face of extremism or even egging it on, as are the eleven Republican cosponsors of a House bill that would require future presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates when they file their statements of candidacy, an obvious sop to the so-called "birther" movement whose adherents claim that Obama is not an American citizen. Instead of elected officials acting as a sort of restraining ego to the activists, everyone here shares one big id.

There is, of course, one last trait all these people have in common. They, or at least 98 percent of those I saw on the mall on September 12, are white. It's difficult to say what part race plays in their anger. But because they are so overwhelmingly white, everything these folks say about "their" country being taken away from them has an inevitable racial overtone. Would this movement have started if, say, Hillary Clinton or John Edwards were president? I think it probably would have—Lord knows, there are few Hillary Clinton admirers among these groups. And I think it does have ideological rather than racial roots and causes. But it seems unlikely that it would have emerged with quite this ferocity—unlikely, for example, that the presence of a President Edwards would have led to people carrying guns to presidential speeches, as happened when Obama spoke to veterans in Phoenix this summer. And there seemed a racial angle, too, in the anger that exploded last spring about having to pay for "losers'" mortgages.

We can't measure this, and I'm not sure what good it would do us to know even if we could. What we do know is that this movement is backed by corporate millions, powerful media organizations, such as Fox News, and votes in Congress, and that it will be around for quite some time, advancing new fake scandals and lies. The next phase in all this, if health care passes, might well be "nullification" lawsuits or resolutions in states that don't want to have to implement Obama's reform.

There's a name for the followers of this movement, too—the "tenthers," as in the Tenth Amendment, which reserves unenumerated rights to the states. So far this year, thirty-seven states have introduced so-called "sovereignty resolutions," and North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Alaska, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee have passed them. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have all intimated that if Obama's health care plan is enacted, nullification may be the best course of action. If they choose it, I'm sure there will be another march.

[judge wopner]

www.thenation.com

But How Does the GOP Win With 1 Percent of the Vote?
posted by John Nichols on 10/07/2009 @ 12:31pm

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann maintains one of the largest press operations in Congress. Her staff goes out of its way to "place" the Republican firebrand on television and radio talk shows.

So Bachmann should "get" a thing or two about the realities of right-wing talk radio and conservative cable television.

For instance, while right's radio and cable hosts have loyal audiences, they speak to highly-partisan audiences that like living in an echo chamber. That's the nature of the game. Most liberal talk-radio and cable television programs focus on their side's faithful -- although, it is notable that some progressive hosts, such as Ed Schultz (a prairie populist who made his name in Fargo) and Stephanie Miller (the daughter of Barry Goldwater's vice presidential running-mate) bust out of the echo chamber to take unscreened calls and actually debate conservative listeners.

But whether we're talking about talk-radio and cable on the right or the left, it's important to remember that the vast majority of Americans are getting their information from other sources.

In other words, even the most popular hosts are not necessarily the definitional players in our national conversation -- let alone our politics.

This is something Bachmann should recognize.

But she seems to be confused -- to put it charitably -- and maybe just a little politically suicidal.

Appearing on CNN's "Larry King Show" the other night, she argued that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are the new voices not just of the Republican Party but of America.

King kept noting that the actual appeal of Beck -- the hot new "star" of the right -- and his compatriots is miniscule when compared with the potential audience. "They're talking (to) about one percent of the population," observed the veteran cable host. "They had no effect on the election... Would you want them to be the voice of the Republican Party?"

In fact, only the grand old man of right-wing talk radio, Limbaugh, can stake a reasonable claim on a listenership that exceeds 5 percent of the population. And even by Limbaugh's wildest estimates of his appeal, his listenership does not account for 10 percent of the voting-age population.

But Bachmann wasn't interested in real numbers, or in the very real prospect that she was proposing a strategy that could further narrow the appeal of a Republican party that has yet to rebound in the polls after two dismal election cycles.

Here, courtesy of the keen observers at Think Progress is a snippet of the conversation:

KING: Would you want the Limbaugh, that crowd -- would you want them to be your voice as the Republican Party stands in this country?

BACHMANN: Well remember it's who the American people are referring to Larry. And the American people are looking to voices like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck...

KING: I just told you -- it's 2 percent of America (that regularly tunes in to Bachmann's favorite programming). It's 2 percent!

BACHMANN: If you look for a critical mass, that's the movement, that's the direction that the critical mass is going. And the American people are very smart people.

The American people are very smart people.

The vast majority of them pay scant attention to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Michele Bachmann. And when Americans come in contact with the toxic rhetoric of the right, they wisely reject it. (Back in the spring, when Limbaugh was making headlines with his "I hope Obama fails" ranting, polls showed that Americans approved of Obama by a 65-29 margin, while they disapproved of Limbaugh 46-30.)

The question that King was trying to get at, and that Bachmann could not quite wrap her head around, was the electoral reality that, even if President Obama and the Democrats stumble, the Republican party is going to have a hard time renewing itself with a "critical mass" that hugs the far fringes of the political continuum.

Perhaps that is why, when Bachmann was finished with her rumination, King did not try to argue with her.

He simply chuckled and said: "That's funny."

[praktik]

Originally Posted by -Mercury-

they're using the same playbook that they've been using for at least the last half century!

The Tea Party’s (old) paranoia
Today’s fervent ideological movement has roots in post-World War II right

By J. Patrick Coolican

Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010 | 2 a.m.


The federal government, under the guise of helping the mentally ill, is establishing a concentration camp in Alaska to house political opponents — a new step on the path toward totalitarianism.

Dan Smoot and other historical footnotes made the allegation in 1956, and it briefly became an obsessive cause of the right-wing grass roots, with each new allegation topping the last.

Perhaps this episode sounds vaguely familiar. That’s because Fox commentator Glenn Beck said last year he had tried but could not refute claims that the Obama administration was creating FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) camps that would house its political opponents.

Remarking on the camps and his failed attempt to “debunk” the allegation, Beck said: “If you have any kind fear that we might be heading toward a totalitarian state, look out. Buckle up. There is something happening in our country and it ain’t good.”

He would later correct his FEMA camp story, but by then, the myth had implanted itself.

Beck and the Tea Party movement of which he is a central figure are often portrayed as a new and exotic political phenomenon. Pollsters treat the Tea Party movement like a third political party, and indeed, it is especially popular at the moment among unaffiliated voters new to politics.

For voters — most recently in last week’s Massachusetts special election — who believe big government and big business are engaged in a corrupt marriage, the movement feels like a refreshing voice for average people who aren’t in those backrooms and so aren’t getting cut in on the deals, like during health care reform negotiations.

Indeed, Kay Lawrence, a retired art gallery manager who attended a Tea Party event in Las Vegas recently, voices this complaint: “We’re sick of these sweetheart deals.”

For all its apparent freshness, however, the Tea Party movement is neither new nor novel, historians and political scientists say.

It is firmly rooted, in its ideology, rhetoric and — there’s no polite word for it — its paranoia, in the post-World War II American right.

Every few years, usually though not always during a Democratic administration, the movement reappears, with a similar set of grievances: The expansion of government is moving us toward socialism; there’s been a dangerous weakening of the national security apparatus but also, paradoxically, the threat of police state provisions at home; an alien subversive of nefarious intentions, composed of cosmopolitan elites and corrupt “one worlders” has infected the government.

In the 1950s, conservatives were angered when their champion, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, was shoved aside by Republican elites in favor of the moderate Dwight Eisenhower.

Kathy Olmsted, a University of California, Davis historian of the period, notes that they accused the one-time Supreme Allied Commander of being a communist agent, an allegation made repeatedly by candy tycoon Robert Welch.

Consider the far-right rallying cry during the presidency of Bill Clinton: Jackbooted government thugs were on the loose; American soldiers were fighting under the U.N. flag; the 1993 tax increase — and yet another failed attempt at health care reform — the marks of a closet socialist.

The most fitting parallel, however, may be the early 1960s, when right-wing activists believed the civil rights movement was the work of the Soviets and, as Ronald Reagan alleged, Medicare a push for socialized medicine.

“The tropes, the rhetoric, the cultural profile — there are profound similarities,” says Rick Perlstein, who has completed two books of a trilogy on the history of the conservative movement and is widely viewed by conservatives and liberals alike as its key chronicler.

Like President Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy was a “first” — the first Catholic president in a nation with a long history of anti-Catholic bigotry and conspiracy theories about powerful papists. Like Obama, Kennedy’s administration was staffed with Eastern elites from the best schools and largest corporations, all viewed warily by Sun Belt and rural Americans.

Another parallel, Olmsted says, the Tea Party movement is not unlike a right-wing activist group of the time, The John Birch Society. “The John Birch Society was extreme, but also connected to the Republican Party, and Republican politicians had to make a decision about whether they were with the movement,” she says.

Then there’s the paranoia: Before it was communist plots, now it is “death panels” and the belief that the administration is eager to seize guns.

Gun sales have skyrocketed since Obama’s election. In November 2008, FBI background checks for prospective gun buyers rose 41.6 percent compared with a year earlier, even though Democratic politicians have shown no interest in meaningful gun control in years and have blamed the issue for electoral losses in 1994 and 2000.

Even reasonable Tea Party activists, such as some from the recent Las Vegas event interviewed by the Sun, take it as given that Obama is a socialist. It hardly seems to matter that a significant chunk of the stimulus was a tax cut, or that his chief economist is centrist Larry Summers, or that the bailouts of the auto and banking industries began under President George W. Bush, or that Reagan favored the bailout of Chrysler in 1980, or that Reagan raised taxes to save Social Security.

Obama is a socialist, if he’s not a fascist, a Nazi, or a totalitarian.

Like the Tea Party movement, this paranoia is not new, nor is it confined to the right.

In 2005, as the left pulled at its hair over imagined Bush conspiracies, conservative columnist David Brooks recalled Richard Hofstadter’s seminal 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values,” Hofstadter wrote. “He is always manning the barricades of civilization.”

As for the enemy, “He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.”

And, “He is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful ...”

David Brown, a Hofstadter biographer and historian at Elizabethtown College, notes that Hofstadter places the populist right in the context of America’s long tradition of paranoid political movements that effectively “magnify the opposition.”

The use of the clinical term “paranoid” to describe the president’s opponents is surely condescending.

“It’s condescending, but it also happens to be true,” says Michael Munger, a Duke University political scientist who is a libertarian and has been a keynote speaker at a number of Tea Party rallies.

He says we’ve reached a tipping point of paranoia and conspiracy mongering, fed by two trends: loss of credibility of official sources culminating, as far as conservatives are concerned, with this administration; and the profusion of media outlets that feed on conspiracy and paranoia.

Indeed, there are differences between the current Tea Party movement and its ancestors, especially in the media.

Whereas there were once a handful of powerful media voices, now there are thousands.

Perlstein notes that establishment media of the early 1960s acted as a filter against extremism. Walter Cronkite, for instance, would never countenance the likes of Orly Taitz, a leader of the movement to prove Obama was born in Kenya. And, yet, there she is on the cable networks.

As Olmsted notes, “With cable, there’s an endless appetite for feeding the monster. And with Fox, it’s made to order.”

There was another check on the extremism of the early 1960s — the conservative movement itself. As conservative historian Sam Tanenhaus and Perlstein have noted, the godfather of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, acted as de facto disciplinarian, casting out the Birch Society and the radical libertarian Ayn Rand.

Buckley is dead, and there are no voices of such singular influence who could play the same role.

Also different: The Republican Party of the early 1960s had a strong contingent of moderates or “Rockefeller Republicans” who favored civil rights and opposed the destruction of the New Deal.

They are gone now, as much a relic as Brylcreem, which makes “purifying” the party an ever more extreme proposition.

What is unknown at this point is whether the Tea Party will have the same lasting success as the conservatives of the early 1960s.

Whatever their now-discredited views about Medicare and the civil rights movement, conservative activists were effective — they overthrew the Republican Party’s Eastern establishment and nominated then-Sen. Barry M. Goldwater in 1964.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of Kennedy and Goldwater’s own rhetoric — “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” — scared voters and led to a landslide for Democrats in 1964.

But Goldwater’s “The Conscience of a Conservative” remained a founding text of the modern movement, a work of elegant prose and cogent argument, while a speech Reagan gave just before the 1964 defeat would live on like a Homeric poem.

And just 16 years later, the Reagan Revolution was on.

[judge wopner]

great article,

though i find it interesting he draws so few if any parallels b/w the mass protests and passive-agressive name calling and hostility that surrounded GWB's 2 terms in office.

seems as though people are trying so desparately to portray the tea-bag movement as some sort of neo-right-wing racist revivalist movement, yet we know most of the people that attend these things aren't violent, have no intention of tyring to kill the president or any of the implied actions the citation of gun sales is mean to elicit in the article. ( part of the reason for a spike in registrations has been due to the perceived threat of tight gun laws leading people to buy in advance, not because they want to go out and shoot obama)

the same way most people who protested the war in iraq werent lefty pinko gays with multiple graduate degree's as the right loved to charge them with. most people from both sides of the political spectrum probally have more in common than they like to believe.

[praktik]

Originally Posted by judge wopner

seems as though people are trying so desparately to portray the tea-bag movement as some sort of neo-right-wing racist revivalist movement, yet we know most of the people that attend these things aren't violent, have no intention of tyring to kill the president or any of the implied actions the citation of gun sales is mean to elicit in the article. ( part of the reason for a spike in registrations has been due to the perceived threat of tight gun laws leading people to buy in advance, not because they want to go out and shoot obama)

It has more to do with the underlying themes of the movement, the government that's "slipping away" into the hands of "others" like socialists (fellow travellers of communists we all know), the government that's going to try and control all aspects of your life and take away your guns, the death panels... Its that kind of apocalyptic theme that many find troubling, and is the common link between this particular manifestation and say, the McCarthy/Goldwater era.

[praktik]

Originally Posted by judge wopner

though i find it interesting he draws so few if any parallels b/w the mass protests and passive-agressive name calling and hostility that surrounded GWB's 2 terms in office.

Actually that's a plus in my books.

I talk with a lot of Americans online about politics on an American-dominated forum and there's a common practise there that is quickly becoming my most annoying pet peeve: the idea that the most logical place to be is the place equidistant between left and right. There's lot's of posters there that are very quick to say.. "well, the right/left does this too you know..."

Ya, thanks for that. Rarely does it provide anything of value to the subject and in some ways it detracts from it. If we're discussing trends in right-wing politics let's stay there. By constantly appealing to this "on the one hand/on the other hand" false dichotomy I think we lose something because we end up tempted to conclude it's all a wash. Our intellectual exercise is halted prematurely. This is also one of the biggest failings of establishment journalism.

Now this is not to say that parallels can't be drawn, and there is a certain alienation that is pushing some on the left to conspiracy theories about 9/11 and globalization and pushing some on the right to teabaggerism. This is just to say that those kind of parallels need the proper attention and care and that is not the kind of thing I see all that often out there. Better to leave that to a separate article.

A good example would be Matt Taibbi's excellent "The Great Derangement", where he explores the world of religious fundamentalists and 9/11 conspiracy theorists, linking them to a wider alienation caused by decades of corruption, political pandering and an establishment that the common man feels little connection to.

[judge wopner]

Originally Posted by praktik

Actually that's a plus in my books.

I talk with a lot of Americans online about politics on an American-dominated forum and there's a common practise there that is quickly becoming my most annoying pet peeve: the idea that the most logical place to be is the place equidistant between left and right. There's lot's of posters there that are very quick to say.. "well, the right/left does this too you know..."

Ya, thanks for that. Rarely does it provide anything of value to the subject and in some ways it detracts from it. If we're discussing trends in right-wing politics let's stay there. By constantly appealing to this "on the one hand/on the other hand" false dichotomy I think we lose something because we end up tempted to conclude it's all a wash. Our intellectual exercise is halted prematurely. This is also one of the biggest failings of establishment journalism.

Now this is not to say that parallels can't be drawn, and there is a certain alienation that is pushing some on the left to conspiracy theories about 9/11 and globalization and pushing some on the right to teabaggerism. This is just to say that those kind of parallels need the proper attention and care and that is not the kind of thing I see all that often out there. Better to leave that to a separate article.

A good example would be Matt Taibbi's excellent "The Great Derangement", where he explores the world of religious fundamentalists and 9/11 conspiracy theorists, linking them to a wider alienation caused by decades of corruption, political pandering and an establishment that the common man feels little connection to.

i very much disagree with you, and yes i am a firm believer in the idea that whats good for the good is good for the gander. (whatever that means!!)

for real though, i believe that its disingenuous to discuss the traits of one end of the political spectrum in isolation, of course if right wing supporters have black hair and its backed by legit stats we can accept this as fact, but if your nation as a whole has is over %90 black haired, then suddenly this stat is pointless.

when we discuss mass movements at either political end, we need to consider what makes them different from mass movements in general politically. otherwise we are simply saying "people on the left protested alot during GWB's reign, it looks like this is a tradition going way back"....

a better application of your example would be corporate collusion in politics, if we discovered the right wing colluded with corporations, of course apologists would claim it happens on both ends of the political spectrum, but the kicker would be to consider in which end is it worse?
then we have an argument in which a left/right equivalency is invalid.

back to the tea baggers:

there was no shortage of progressives calling for the possibility of the wide-scale decline of America and their democratic institutions during GWB's reign, and i personally agreed with much of that sentiment. there was a widespread fear among many democrats and those to the left of centre that the republicans had screwed up the country, had led them into at least 1 pointless war, and was responsible for a modern day Gestapo in the dept of homeland security and what many considered an erorsion of basic human rights.

gitmo was referred to as a modern day gulag, and abu ghraib was in many way symbolic of all that the bushites had done wrong.

it would be easy to say that there was a climate among many on the left that a police state was not far behind such developments, that a democrat would fix or return america from the brink of its demise. people spoke of the damages that occured on GWB's watch like 9/11 and the stock market collapse.

now that the shoe is on the other foot, and people are blaming obama for the very same things, imagining their nation is on the decline. the commonality i see is not left/right but people acting politically in a misguided manner. people in general are prone to fear-mongering which is why i feel the need to bring up this when considering the left/right paradigm.

the fear liberals have for a Sarah Palin presidency is no different fundamentally than the fear a republican has of a president they believe to be "socialist". both are based on the idea that i power, such a person would make their wildest nightmares a reality even though we have little if any reason to believe it.

people are scared of palin even though she's out of office, they fear that people are so stupid they will believe her nonsense and vote her in office. people are so scared of socialism yet they have no idea how many socialist style benefits they already enjoy that were supported by both democrat and republican regimes and houses. these fears tap into a primordial theme of politics that exist on both sides, hence the need to reconsider when we charge one side with being a, b, or c.

like i said before, i think if you actually went to a tea party you would find in general that the people there have no realistic intention to kill the president, reinstate the racist policy the writer of your last article links them to, and that they share sentiments that both ends of the political spectrum share: the never-ending, revolving door belief that the political party they support will save the nation from destruction wrought on by the political party they dont support.

after the fort hood shooting we got a great example of how fear-mongering is the same trait expressed differently on both sides of the political spectrum:

right leanign types were fear mongering more attacks by violent muslims, fear of terrorists among us

the left was fear mongering racist attacks against innocent muslims by racist americans seeking revenge

both sides ramped up the fear mongering and virtually nothing happened. no retribution or revenge attacks on a scale predicted, no large scale slides into a police state....

so when people point to the behaviour of one side, i look at the other side to remind myself its less a political event and more of a human event.

each election is hailed as a dawning of a new america, each shift back from republican to democrat is portrayed as a turning of a tide, of voters reacting to years of "mismanagement" and displeasure.... it is all the same in my mind. today its tea baggers, next republican regime it will be something else claiming the decline of america, of the descent into poverty and destruction of human rights, of corruption and what not that the other side is being accused of now.

[praktik]

Originally Posted by judge wopner

each election is hailed as a dawning of a new america, each shift back from republican to democrat is portrayed as a turning of a tide, of voters reacting to years of "mismanagement" and displeasure.... it is all the same in my mind. today its tea baggers, next republican regime it will be something else claiming the decline of america, of the descent into poverty and destruction of human rights, of corruption and what not that the other side is being accused of now.

I was about to take things apart a few at a time, but its the part in bold there that is really my pet peeve, and if you're going to continue to assert it, we might as well agree to disagree.

It's not that comparisons with other political movements elsewhere on the spectrum are a priori invalid, its that typically they are not done with the proper care to isolate the factors that are different, or with proper attention to the unique political traditions, events, personalities and history of "either side" and so we end up at a "its all the same" kind of place, which I think is a form of the fallacy of the golden mean, and an intellectually stagnant place to be.

As I said above, I am perfectly aware of ways that opposing extremists mirror each other: the Manichaean approach to politics, the absolutist doctrine, the purging of the politically impure, the apocalyptic themes of their worldview. This can be a useful exercise, no doubt.

That being said, I think we owe it to ourselves to not just find the things in common but also the things that are unique. And I think that to do that we need to abandon the "on the one hand/on the other hand" comparisons and start following the cultural history of each movement on its own terms. Look at the wellspring of ideas that form their worldview.

Another good example of this would be analyses of communism and fascism. If you're talking about authoritarian systems of government there are certainly places where in practise some ideas were similar. But if an analysis of communism is constantly detoured into "well this is what the fascists did", then are we really learning about communism and its history? Or are we engaged in a different exercise alltogether? Then you're really talking about authoritarianism, rather than communism or fascism.

Above, you're really talking about political extremism and partisanship in general, rather than conducting a detailed analysis of the right-wing manifestation thereof. And while I find you infinitely more credible and worth reading than many on the other board I mentioned, I should be clear that most commonly the reference to "the other side" is used by partisans in a hand-waving kind of way so as to deflect serious inquiry into "their side", or so as to appear as even-handed and moderate as possible (people priding themselves on their moderation and racing to occupy the pedestal in the middle). It is these weak offerings that draw my ire the most.

I don't think this is the case with you personally and I hate to predict other people's thoughts but its my opinion you've adopted this stance in reaction to what you have perceived as unfair attacks on the teabaggers that draw them in caricature. I dont disagree that such attacks exist and I would like to remind you that studying conservative politics has become something of a passion for me and that from my perspective, I surely recognize the underlying humanity of the teabaggers and that they are more complex than commonly portrayed. I have never argued that they all want to kill the president, only that that the underlying themes of their politics lend themselves to cheerleading adversarialism at best and violence at worst (qualified of course by the fact that this manifests itself rarely).

An example of someone on the left who takes an equally nuanced view of the right (and a personal favourite of mine) would be Thomas Frank. He treats them as complex human beings and doesn't fall for jingoism, even if his politics are diametrically opposed. And he got to that place by tracing the lineage of their ideas and their propagation through the movement: from the grassroots organizations that propelled Goldwater to the nomination through to the direct mail campaigns of the 80s and the rise of the Moral Majority, the Gingrich revolution and Dubyaism.

Of course, there was a particular collapse of the left in America as the Democrats cannibalized themselves in the 60s and keynesianism died an ideological death in the 70s, and references to these cannot be escaped - but the key when trying to understand a particular brand of politics is to keep the focus there - and try and avoid the temptation of the golden mean..

[atbell]

Originally Posted by praktik

It has more to do with the underlying themes of the movement, the government that's "slipping away" into the hands of "others" like socialists (fellow travellers of communists we all know), the government that's going to try and control all aspects of your life and take away your guns, the death panels... Its that kind of apocalyptic theme that many find troubling, and is the common link between this particular manifestation and say, the McCarthy/Goldwater era.

Isn't the apocalyptic theme something that was a common thread in complaints against Bush too?

I seem to remember similar responses to Bob Ray's election in Ontario's parliment, some of my friends dads speculating they'd move to the US and such.

I guess the difficulty with trying to figure out how much of a point the extremists have is sorting out the components of the paranoid pandering that is sour grapes from the component that contains valid, if exagerated complaints. I find it hard to simply write off opposition to Obama on fears that he might usher in a police state administration, in exactly the same way it was hard to do the same with similar complaints about Bush. Unfortunately the reason the complaints exist and remain compelling is the same with both administrations, the chances of authoritarian measures being inacted as a NECESSARY response to organized civil unrest seem to be continually rising, regarless of which side of the spectrum has thier finger on the button.

[atbell]

Originally Posted by praktik

Actually that's a plus in my books.

I talk with a lot of Americans online about politics on an American-dominated forum and there's a common practise there that is quickly becoming my most annoying pet peeve: the idea that the most logical place to be is the place equidistant between left and right. There's lot's of posters there that are very quick to say.. "well, the right/left does this too you know..."

Ya, thanks for that. Rarely does it provide anything of value to the subject and in some ways it detracts from it. If we're discussing trends in right-wing politics let's stay there. By constantly appealing to this "on the one hand/on the other hand" false dichotomy I think we lose something because we end up tempted to conclude it's all a wash. Our intellectual exercise is halted prematurely. This is also one of the biggest failings of establishment journalism.

Now this is not to say that parallels can't be drawn, and there is a certain alienation that is pushing some on the left to conspiracy theories about 9/11 and globalization and pushing some on the right to teabaggerism. This is just to say that those kind of parallels need the proper attention and care and that is not the kind of thing I see all that often out there. Better to leave that to a separate article.

A good example would be Matt Taibbi's excellent "The Great Derangement", where he explores the world of religious fundamentalists and 9/11 conspiracy theorists, linking them to a wider alienation caused by decades of corruption, political pandering and an establishment that the common man feels little connection to.

Looking at both (any?) extreme and agreeing with a wide spread feeling of alienation I'm tempted to place significant blame for the apeal of paranoid pandering and massive apocalyptic hysteria at the feet of the American education system; maybe even at the more broad hostility to intelect in the majore US cultural currents. When examined many of the loudest theories on the fringe can be reduced to nuisance issues with the tools gained in the early years of high school. That there are so many adherents to these views suggests that the tools of early high school fame have either been lost or were never gained by large swaths of the American (Canadian?) public.

I don't think that left/right comparison derails discussions of the issues of either side so long as it is not used as an 'excuse'. I've read articles where that kind of tit for tat extrimisim is supported and I can see how easily the tactic could be used to derail valid criticisims. I do, however, find comparisions useful in peeling back the motivations of the fringe, such as broad feelings of alienation.

A faux centrist trend is definately interesting to think about, especially if it is so percicely calculated to land equidistant between extreems. Notions of political correct comportment shouldn't paper over a persons expression of valid positions that they support with rational argument that could be considered to be leaning in either direction. Calculated centrisim is nothing more than pandering.

[atbell]

Originally Posted by judge wopner

for real though, i believe that its disingenuous to discuss the traits of one end of the political spectrum in isolation, of course if right wing supporters have black hair and its backed by legit stats we can accept this as fact, but if your nation as a whole has is over %90 black haired, then suddenly this stat is pointless.

Bah, stats are dirty dirty things. Studies and corelations are a dime a dozen and have little relation to truth in any meaningful sense. The unfortunate thing is that there are decent studies and corelations, say between things like heart problems and obesity or exersise, yet the differences between good and bad studies, stats and corelations remain hidden until the whole system, from data collection to reporting, is scrutinized.

An old argument, but worth repeating in short.

a better application of your example would be corporate collusion in politics, if we discovered the right wing colluded with corporations, of course apologists would claim it happens on both ends of the political spectrum, but the kicker would be to consider in which end is it worse?
then we have an argument in which a left/right equivalency is invalid.

I don't know much about the new corporate financing reforms but from the sounds of it these collusions could be back in vogue. Obama made a bit of a disturbing reference to this bill in his speach last night as he mentioned the opening for foreign companies to begin supporting US political initiatives and personalities through financing. If bad luck prevails this could provide a wedge for xenophobic and rasist reactionaries, pulling nicely on the alienation of being 'controled by the other'; of being powerless.

there was no shortage of progressives calling for the possibility of the wide-scale decline of America and their democratic institutions during GWB's reign, and i personally agreed with much of that sentiment. there was a widespread fear among many democrats and those to the left of centre that the republicans had screwed up the country, had led them into at least 1 pointless war, and was responsible for a modern day Gestapo in the dept of homeland security and what many considered an erorsion of basic human rights.

I'm in a similar position. I think there are quite valid concerns, if not yet fears, that the authoritarian currents in the US are strengthening. I was more concerned with GWB and his goons at the wheel than with Obama but the fact remains that economic stresses across the country could instigate upheaval and/or orginized movments with destructive aims and/or methods.

In a way I'm not sure what's worse, knowning that there could be growing support for authoritarian measures or conceding that there could be an actual need for such measures to confront orginized extreemists.

people are scared of palin even though she's out of office, they fear that people are so stupid they will believe her nonsense and vote her in office. people are so scared of socialism yet they have no idea how many socialist style benefits they already enjoy that were supported by both democrat and republican regimes and houses. these fears tap into a primordial theme of politics that exist on both sides, hence the need to reconsider when we charge one side with being a, b, or c.

The fear of the stupid neibour sounds like something that could resonate well in the US. It does bring up an interesting kind of comment about the falicy of uniformity in the country though. As much as public claims of equality and similiarity are spouted regularily, fearing that 'people' are so stupid they might elect Palin admits that 'people' are different from the self. It leads to a bit of a condesending position where we are all the same and I'm smarter than most people who are the same.

It's almost as if notions of uniformity fuel fears because people, especially those who are on the extremes, know that the claims of uniformity are false and that the 'others' could be dangerously not like the self.

like i said before, i think if you actually went to a tea party you would find in general that the people there have no realistic intention to kill the president, reinstate the racist policy the writer of your last article links them to, and that they share sentiments that both ends of the political spectrum share: the never-ending, revolving door belief that the political party they support will save the nation from destruction wrought on by the political party they dont support.

after the fort hood shooting we got a great example of how fear-mongering is the same trait expressed differently on both sides of the political spectrum:

right leanign types were fear mongering more attacks by violent muslims, fear of terrorists among us

the left was fear mongering racist attacks against innocent muslims by racist americans seeking revenge

both sides ramped up the fear mongering and virtually nothing happened. no retribution or revenge attacks on a scale predicted, no large scale slides into a police state....

so when people point to the behaviour of one side, i look at the other side to remind myself its less a political event and more of a human event.

each election is hailed as a dawning of a new america, each shift back from republican to democrat is portrayed as a turning of a tide, of voters reacting to years of "mismanagement" and displeasure.... it is all the same in my mind. today its tea baggers, next republican regime it will be something else claiming the decline of america, of the descent into poverty and destruction of human rights, of corruption and what not that the other side is being accused of now.

The beleif that things will change if only 'our boys' were in charge is laughable on either side of the spectrum for sure. There's even an element of passing the blame in this kind of thinking which is quite negative. It could be seen as a feeling that one is only responsible for voting for the right person once every 4 years and nothing more.

I'm still suspect about the tea bag movement and it's educational credentials. There's just something about a group who will willingly call themselves 'teabaggers' that screams out of touch.