CT Blue

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.

Some people can never rest easy. Consider Poor Tom Paine. During the latter years of his life he was hounded, even on his deathbed, by what passed at the time as the American right-both secular and religious. His name was mud from the early nineteenth century until the mid twentieth, despite all he had done to bring about and sustain the American Revolution. Why? Because he wrote The Age of Reason, a frontal assault on faith based mental processing (we can’t call it thinking).

But far worse has been his treatment since 1980 when the American Right, starting with Ronald Reagan, tried to adopt him as their own. As with so much of their fact free cogitating, there is no evidence that Paine would be at all sympathetic to their creed. He was, after all, not sympathetic to any creed.

Apparently, Glenn Beck is now trying to wrap himself in Paine’s mantle, encouraging folks to follow where, he asserts, Paine would surely lead in the struggle against creeping socialism.

Some of us actually believe that it might not be such a bad thing if there were some truth to Beck’s fears about socialism, but let’s put that aside for the moment.

Paine as a free market, Ayn Rand acolyte? Has Beck read any Paine lately? (answer, no.) Well, I’ve read it all and I agree with this Kos diarist that Paine was a socialist in all but name. This diary is well worth a read for those not familiar with Paine’s thinking. It discusses Paine’s Agrarian Justice. I remember thinking, when I first read that pamphlet, that Paine was something of a proto-Marx.

In Agrarian Justice Paine develops a theoretical justification and a practical program for a system akin to social security. The theoretical basis is interesting. Paine argues that we own the earth in common, and those that have secured large portions for their own use owe the rest a “rent”. It’s socialist thinking from first to last. The practical program may or may not have been all that practical, but he was clearly not a fan of social security privatization. It’s government run and government funded from first to last, and let’s not even get into the class warfare aspect of it.

We on the left can’t let the right confiscate Tom Paine. He’s ours, from his socialist ravings, to his most effective promoters (e.g., Howard Fast, who wrote Citizen Tom Paine, a book I’ve owned since I was eight, and Moncure Conway, slave-holder turned abolitionist and free thinker) to his religious principles. They can have Alexander Hamilton. He’d probably turn in his grave to be in their company, but who cares?