Fringe: the right wing goes over the deep end
Maybe it’s Barack Obama. The very thought of him seems to have driven some Republicans mad. In Congress, their strategy is to simply throw everything they have up against whatever he’s doing and run the other way. In the right wing media, on Fox News and conservative talk radio, it’s no-holds-barred. Nothing is too crass, too low, to spew at the president of the United States. It’s enough to make the “Dubya is stupid” shtick from the previous eight years look like a compliment. And while the media is fixated on the tea party movement, which lets face it, has its issues (like random speakers letting fly with their fantasies about hanging members of Congress…) what should really be alarming people is the extent to which the “ordinary” right is becoming radical. Case in point: the return of the John Birch Society. From The Daily Beast:
It’s CPAC time again—the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual Washington cattle call begins Friday. This year, they’ve attracted an all-star lineup in a bid for renewed respectability: a half-dozen GOP presidential hopefuls (Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, etc.), conservative congressional darlings, a keynote address by Glenn Beck. And co-sponsorship by the John Birch Society.
Wait, what?
To get an idea why John Avlon reacted like that, you’ve got to remember who the John Birchers are …
The John Birch Society—a stridently anti-communist, paleo-conservative group—was exiled from the mainstream conservative movement back in the 1960s because of its penchant for conspiracy theories. The group had a starring role in Richard Hofstadter’s classic The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and founder Robert Welch infamously described President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.”
But calling the Republican Cold War president and World War II commander a Soviet spy was only the beginning of the skullduggery asserted by the well-funded Birchers. They believed that Ike was taking orders from his brother Milton (“actually his superior and boss within the whole left-wing establishment”) and that then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was also part of the cabal. The conspiracy included, of course, key members of the Democratic Roosevelt and Truman administrations, and the Birchers estimated that by the summer of 1961 the federal government was 50-70 percent communist-controlled. They made McCarthy seem like a cautious amateur.
If that sounds familiar, you’ve been paying attention to Glenn Beck, who has honed the “paranoid style” and red baiting into a very lucrative art form. Think of how many times not just tea party people, but also “mainstream” Republicans imply or outright charge that President Obama is some combination of a communist, a Marxist, a socialist, etc. Healthcare reform: socialist. The stimulus: a Marxist plot to steal our liberty! In fact, just about anything nearly any Democrat does or proposes these days is immediately cast by the right — the regular-order, mainstream right — as “Communism.” Red baiting is how Beck and his ilk scared the White House into ditching Van Jones (they tried to do the same to Valerie Jarrett, but it didn’t work.) And red-baiting is officially back as a commonplace, everyday GOP tactic. So why not bring back the Birchers? They’re no longer fringe in today’s conservative movement. They ARE the mainstream … and this time, William F. Buckley isn’t around to chase them back into their hole. A bit more from Avlon:
From their headquarters in Appleton, Wisconsin, they had an obscure few intervening years, which included having a Georgia congressman who served as head of the organization that shot down on KAL Flight 007 and a Michigan congressional candidate who was not only a member of the Birchers but also the KKK and the American Nazi Party. They even sat out the Reagan Revolution, telling supporters in 1980 to “forget the presidency” and calling Reagan a “lackey.”
What’s significant now is that as the fringe blurs with the base, the Birchers are closer to the conservative movement mainstream than they have been in half a century. They were railing against the Federal Reserve long before Ron Paul’s “End the Fed” effort. The neo-isolationist movement has given new encouragement to U.S.-out-of-U.N. efforts. The 9/11 Truthers parrot longstanding Bircher claims about the sinister New World Order. With the fiscal crisis, more people are willing to listen to tales about colluding bankers trying to undermine capitalism.
Read the whole article here.
If there is angst among CPAC devotees like the folks at RedState, who are major participants in the CPAC conference (they’re in charge of all the bloggers you know…) about sharing the forum with the Birchers, it’s not apparent, although the irony is pretty rich that RedState has barred “truthers” and “birthers” from its site, even though Birchers fit at least one, and often both of those categories. And the emphasis on paranoia, nativism and conspiracy theories, which also factors into the growing militia and “patriot” movement the New York Times zeroed in on as yet another add-on to the “tea party movement,” and you have a pretty significant fringe growing in this country. I have no idea how large these groups are, but the fact that they are pushing the Republican “center” so far to the right can’t be a good thing, long term, for the GOP (or the country.)
Flashback: conservatives used to (claim to) think the Birchers were nuts. Even the Redstaters used to think they were nuts, back before they got on the same team. (Then again, the Redstaters also used to demand Republican fealty to John McCain …)
Meanwhile, not everybody thinks welcoming the birchers back is such a great idea.
Read the CPAC agenda here.
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[...] Fringe: the right wing goes over the deep end : The Reid Report [...]
[...] Neo-Birchers on the Right In the right wing media, on Fox News and conservative talk radio, it’s no-holds-barred. Nothing is too crass, too low, to spew at the president of the United States. It’s enough to make the “Dubya is stupid” shtick from the previous eight years look like a compliment. [...]