When I was in college I used to amuse myself by reading the John Birch magazine, which was available in the school library.
Even then it struck me that the extreme right had a pronounced paranoid streak. Nothing makes them happier than portraying themselves as beleaguered, under attack, or victims. If possible, all three. They are in fact, far more comfortable and in their element when they are out of power, comfortably able to throw bombs at the grown-ups.
Today’s “tea-bag” demonstrations, despite the fact that they have been fomented in part as a Fox News event, demonstrate that the paranoid streak in American “conservatism” is alive and well. These folks have no coherent philosophy. The demonstrations are over, and no one is able to truly say what the demonstrators wanted. The one thing that seems to unite them is their belief that the government is somehow out to get them. After eight years of having to support that government, they are now free to play the victim once again, and they just love it. Who needs coherence? More telling is the rush by “conservative” commentators to assume that a Department of Homeland Security report on right wing extremism refers to them. This is mother’s milk to them. Nothing excites their followers so much as the idea that someone is out to get them. If that means that they must implicitly accuse themselves of political extremism, then so be it. Their followers can’t think clearly enough to figure that out, anyway.
What we don’t know is whether this kind of demagoguery can be a winning political strategy. It didn’t work during the Depression, but as bad as that crisis was, it still took place at a time when America was on the ascendant. There is a pervasive feeling now that America is on the decline, which in fact it may be. There’s nothing to say that the political turnaround that took place between 2004 and 2008 (remember, in 2004 the smart money was on Republican hegemony for the foreseeable future), couldn’t happen in reverse, and just as quickly. If it does, the disaffected will have nowhere to go but to a party that is now utterly dominated, as it has never been before, by people who are frankly mentally ill. Bush was bad enough, but like every Republican president since Eisenhower, he’ll look better than the next Republican to succeed him.
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