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THE PARANOID PARTY
04/07/2009
There is an element of paranoia in American politics that takes things completely beyond the pale. It is a strange combination of fear and wild conspiracy theories, fueled by people who get their hands on a microphone and appeal to susceptible, frightened, and often unbalanced people.
Here's an example: Michelle Bachmann last weekend on Minnesota radio station KTLK-AM. She was speaking about the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, a proposed expansion of the AmeriCorps program. Said Bachmann: "I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concern is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums."
Michelle Bachmann, amazing as it seems, is a Congresswoman. Her audience is largely in the state of Minnesota, where there are apparently enough paranoid people who agree with her. Glenn Beck, on the other hand, has a national audience as a host of a FOX News program where he literally cries for "my country" and warns of fascism and a global world order, brought on by Obama, FEMA camps where Americans will be incarcerated, and confiscation of everyone's guns. As he spews his insanity, video of Nazi storm troopers plays on a giant screen behind him.
Recently, his paranoia has hit pay dirt as a deranged American acted on such fears. Richard Poplawski, a white supremacist, was arrested last weekend for the killing of three Pittsburg police officers who had responded to a domestic violence call at his residence. Poplawski was a troubled young man who had been expelled from a Catholic school and given a dishonorable discharge from the army. He was a frequent commenter on Stormfront, a white supremacist on-line discussion forum. But until this past weekend, he had not shot anyone. Here's where Glenn Beck comes in. Poplawski posted a link on Stormfront of a YouTube video of Beck talking to Congressman Ron Paul about FEMA camps.
Beck's rantings encouraged Poplawski's paranoia, just as Bernard Goldberg's book denouncing liberals was the inspiration for the Church killings in Knoxville, Tennessee by Jim David Atkisson. In a hand-written manifesto, Atkisson wrote:
"This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."
In spite of the connections to right wing commentary that I have shown here, many will probably dismiss the talk of people like Bachmann, Beck and Goldberg as harmless free speech, the simple thoughts of the opposition to the current administration. I don't see it that way at all. I see it as utterly irresponsible, and completely irrational. That these people have a national audience is problematic in that the paranoia that has often infected American politics is only fueled by it.
Paranoia in American politics is nothing new. Historian Richard J. Hofstadter wrote about it in the sixties in an essay entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." And while paranoia can exist on both sides of the political spectrum, it seems to manifest itself and be tolerated more on the far right side. Yes, there were conspiracy nuts on the left after 9/11 who thought the Bush administration planted explosives in the Twin Towers and brought them down, but there were no representatives in Congress on the Democratic side who believed this, and no television commentators who announced such a view on television.
The conservative movement has a long history of paranoia. It has always been suspicious of government (even though our government is a democratic one, which was created by the people and is run by the people), promoting instead rugged individualism (to make people less dependent on government), small government (to prevent government intrusion into people's lives), low taxes (to prevent the growth of government), unrestricted gun ownership (in case the government comes to harass or control you) and a strong military to be used overseas (to prevent Communist or Islamic takeovers of the country).
Added to this is a relatively new element – not dominant in the days of either Reagan or Goldwater: the implementation of evangelical beliefs and morals (especially in the sexual arena) into public policy, with a push to identify America as a "Christian nation." This comes complete with an apocalyptic ideology of end times when Jesus will come to punish all those who are unbelievers (i.e. Jews, atheists, Muslims, liberals, communists, etc.).
Ideological conservatism has been losing ground lately in elections. Actually, ideological conservatism has always had a hard time achieving or maintaining power, largely because its economic policies are not popular with a majority of people. A majority of Americans, as proved most recently in the 2008 election, favor government regulation of giant corporations, government supervision of matters pertaining to health and welfare of the people, and a government safety net for those who fall on hard times. In spite of Ronald Reagan's two electoral victories in the 1980s, most Americans really do not see government as the "problem." Reagan's sunny personality and his rhetoric of "morning in America" was enough to mask his hard core conservative ideas of limiting government services and allowing everyone to be on their own.
Ideological conservatives thus need more than their ideology to win elections. In fact, conservatives can only gain power when they have a clearly identified enemy. Because their policies favor the wealthy and largely leave the working and middle classes behind, they must appeal to Americans on a different front. So they use the weapons of fear, prejudice and other negative emotions to gain voters. And recently they have also utilized religious fervor to a degree never before seen in a nation that has always honored the separation of church and state.
Conservative Republicans have always needed an enemy to demonize, both to distract Americans from their dishonest and destructive (to the middle class) policies and to win over enough people through fear and hate. First the enemy was Communism and Soviet Russia. There is a direct line of conservative anti-communist fervor from Joe McCarthy, in the fifties, to Barry Goldwater in the sixties, to Ronald Reagan in the seventies and eighties. While we did engage in a long cold war with Soviet Russia, there was an over the top paranoia among Republicans that included witch hunts, the John Birch Society, and military buildups to the point of "mutually assured destruction."
For the past eight years the main foreign enemy has been Islamic terrorism. In addition to these enemies that inspire fear in the American people because of actual or threatened attacks, however, there have also been domestic groups (actual American citizens) that Republicans have made into enemies in order to foment hate and contempt. These have included, at various times, hippies, drug addicts, anti-war protestors, gays, feminists, atheists, "secular humanists," civil rights workers, welfare recipients, the ACLU, "liberals," African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants, both legal and illegal. All you have to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck for a few days and you will hear negative references to or ridicule of at least one of these groups.
But even multiple orange alerts or anti-Communist propaganda or anti-immigrant fervor or racism is not enough to ensure that Republicans stay in power, especially when their opponents in the Democratic Party, in a less paranoid way, also express disdain for Communism, continue the search for Osama bin Laden and the fight against al Qaeda, and promote policies aimed towards keeping out illegal immigrants. So Republicans have to make Democrats into dangerous people, outsiders and enemies of the United States. The Republicans have to turn Democrats into enemies of America.
We see this happening today, with Republican spokesmen ranging all the way from the lunatic Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann to the certifiable Glen Beck to the paranoid former vice president Dick Cheney who insists the country is less safe with Obama as president. The message is clear: Republicans are patriots and Democrats are un-American and dangerous. Conservative mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh even says in clear apocalyptic language that the only way America can be saved is for the Democratic president to fail.
Conservative Republicans have built the fantasy of an ideological left that is anti-American. They have spent years demonizing the word "liberal," equating it with other ideologies like "communist," fascist," or "socialist." They look at their political opponents, Democrats, and they manufacture in their own minds a vast conspiracy to turn the United States of America into a socialist nation where free enterprise no longer exists, and no one can ever be wealthy again. In the current economic crisis, largely created by their elected officials and their policies, they are completely bumfuzzled. They do not know how to handle Obama's popularity and are desperate to defeat him. So they are doing what they always do: accusing the Democrats of being socialists. They are attacking his demands of the banks and the car companies, saying he wants to take over corporations and is trying to destroy capitalism.
The blogger Anonymous Liberal has a far better answer to this strategy than I do:
"I'm always amazed by how willing conservatives are to believe their own lazy caricatures and, as a result, how completely and utterly they fail to understand the actual motivations and beliefs of their political opponents. The reality is that liberals in this country -- including Obama -- have absolutely no desire whatsoever to nationalize private enterprise. They're not going around looking for excuses to take over corporations. Quite the opposite, actually. The absolute last thing that Obama wants to waste his political capital on is trying to run a company…
Obama -- and nearly every other American liberal -- would much rather focus on issues like health care, education, and energy policy, issues they care about and have crafted detailed policy proposals to address. They believe in capitalism and would prefer to govern over a healthy economy in which private industry was humming along and didn't need to be bailed out. How can anyone with any functioning brain cells really believe that Obama wants to spend his time figuring out how save GM? Or that he really wants to have his administration run that company?....
The notion that there is anyone of significance on the American left who still believes in anything approaching genuine socialism is pure fantasy. That debate, to the extent it ever really happened in this country, was settled a long time ago. What we're dealing with right now are differences of opinion regarding how best to manage the failure of a number of major companies. It's not a debate about socialism vs. capitalism; it's a debate about methods of damage control. But many conservatives have so deluded themselves with their own propaganda that they're not even capable of following the conversation any more. So instead they spend all day indulging in paranoid delusions and debates that have no relevance to current events. It's a sad spectacle. "
Today's Republican Party is bereft of effective leadership and thus determined to appeal to the hate, prejudice, fear and paranoia of some Americans to get back in power. Republicans have always been the paranoid party, though there was a time when they could appeal to people's hopes and dreams as well. Ronald Reagan was the quintessential happy warrior who appealed to people on the surface as an optimistic and positive and likable man, even as he was appealing in coded language and symbols to people's fears and prejudices. He called the Soviet Union "The Evil Empire," for example, and announced his candidacy for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi where three civil rights workers were slain in the sixties. There he talked about the importance of "states rights," which has always been an appeal to racists and code for "we don't want the federal government dismantling our Jim Crow laws."
But after Reagan there was no sunny face and likable personality to fool America. George W. Bush seemed likable enough at first, (though it must be remembered that he did not win the popular vote in his first election, and thus did not fool a majority of the people) but his total incompetence made a second term highly improbable. Thus, the orange alerts (appeal to fear of terrorists) and the demonization of John Kerry as an effete snob (appeal to envy) and an unworthy soldier who "lied" about his heroism and then turned against the Vietnam War (appeal to hatred of anti-war activists). Without these things, Bush would have been defeated. His war in Iraq was going badly and people were beginning to realize he led us into war on the basis of falsehoods. His tax cuts were not helping Middle Class Americans and his popularity was on the wane. He thus won in the only way he could – by appealing to the paranoid tendency in some American voters.
In stark contrast, the Democratic Party today is characterized by two forces: a desire for progress for the working and middle classes and a political pragmatism. There really is no pure ideological left that conservatives wish for and demonize. There is no socialist or communist ideology or even a strong liberal ideology with the goal of destroying America. There is a strong movement for social justice, fair economic policies, diplomacy rather than war, and sensible regulation of businesses and banks to protect the public. The foundation of this movement could be described as pragmatic populism, with the goal of implementing policies promoting the "common good" and the prosperity of Main Street, rather than the good merely of the wealthy capitalists and the prosperity of Wall Street.
Fifty-three percent of the country said in November 2008 that the Democratic plan is what they want. They have rejected the Republican policies and ideology that both fooled and failed them.
All the conservatives have left is an appeal to paranoia. We should expect much more of their lunacy in the months and years to come.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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