Has the right gone mad? You betcha

April 24, 2010 · Posted in Opinion, People, Republicans 

The Marc Ambinder piece asking that seminal question has stirred up a lot of responses, most of them broadly described, outside of conservative circles, as “yes.” In fact, almost no matter where you look across this country, the right has seemed to come unhinged. President Obama’s election clearly caused some people’s heads to explode, and the backlash has been, to put it mildly, breathtaking. It includes:

Radical anti-immigrant mania — as exemplified by the stunning turn of events this past week in Arizona, where the flowering of border vigilantism was taken to new heights by the passage — and the governor’s signing of — the most draconian anti-migrant laws this side of Apartheid South Africa. It’s like the Know-Nothing party of the mid-19th century is back with an a-historic vengeance in the American Southwest. And Arizona is not alone in seeking ways to usurp the federal government’s immigration authority.

Second amendment mania — the recent gun nuts march on Washington was just the latest example of the resurgence of gun mania on the right, based on conspiracy theories that the federal government is going to confiscate people’s firearms, despite there being no evidence of it. (In fact, Obama has expanded gun rights, which is the only reason the gun toters were allowed on federal property on April 19th.) Gun owners have turned flashing their guns into an almost fetishistic show of force that has included scaring the bejeezus out of Starbucks customers, and even toting loaded weapons to political rallies near where the president of the United States is speaking. Meanwhile, back in Arizona (which in many ways has become America’s new hothouse for right wing crazy,) we recently saw the passage of wide-open carry gun laws that let people pack heat even in bars — an issue on which Arizona is hardly alone.

The militia and “patriot” movements -- worse than the Second Amendment hysterics are these scary, right wing groups, which fixate on anti-taxation messages, and which often are rooted in an extreme form of Christianity not unlike Islamist fanaticism, rose during the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton (with the crudest result being the Oklahoma City bombing,) and they’re back with a vengeance now, complete with the assassination of police officers and security guards, and the first suicide plane attack in an American city since 9/11. Even worse, these militia’s don’t earn the full condemnation of the vocal right, or even conservative elected officials. On the contrary, people making noises about “revolution” against the federal government often get tacit support, or even are the subjects of hero worship. Did I mention that some of the scariest of these groups, which exist all over the U.S., have long been based in Arizona???

Anti-abortion extremism — both in terms of literal violent resistance to a woman’s right to choose, to legislative action as took place last week in Oklahoma, where the Republican governor, to his credit, vetoed a pair of far-reaching abortion bills, one of which would have required even rape and incest victims to undergo, at the demand of the state, invasive ultrasound, and hear detailed descriptions of the fetus prior to having an abortion. You heard that right — Republican legislators in Oregon want the state government to have power to force women to undergo an unwanted medical procedure. Tea partiers unite! The legislature in that state is promising to override the vetoes …

Confederate worship — exemplified most recently by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s attempts to placate the Sons of Confederate Veterans with a slavery-free proclamation of April as “Confederate history month.” That was followed by another pro-Confederate governor, Mississippi’s Haley Barbour (who issues similar proclamations annually) to exclaim that the howls of protest over the slavery omission “didn’t amount to diddly.” And there’s the secessionist talk of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was rewarded for his madness with a big primary victory. Amazingly, all three of these men are considered, not fringe, crazy characters, but serious presidential contenders for 2012 by the right and its media devotees.

Confederate-style “states rights” and “nullification” militancy — with 15 attorneys general, led by Florida’s Bill McCollum, suing the federal government to try and void healthcare reform (plus some governors looking to go around their A.G.s and join in) plus a growing number of “tenthers” asserting that the federal government’s authority does not supersede that of the states, something the Constitution’s supremacy clause might be surprised to hear.

Birtherism — a demented conspiracy theory first popularized by fringe sites like WorldNutDaily, which unbelievably, is now under serious consideration of being codified by actual state legislatures — like ARIZONA‘s — even though some conservatives have at this point walked away from the notion because it’s even too crazy for them. Still, that hasn’t stopped dentist/lawyer/madwoman Orly Taitz, insane person about town Alan Keyes, and even some troops, from jumping on the birther-wagon.

Bircherism (a/k/a “Palinism”) — if the literal return of the John Birch Society wasn’t enough, you’ve also got its figurative return in the form of an acceleration of the militant anti-intellectualism (on display in fine form here) that was evident during the George W. Bush era, but on steroids. Between the right’s hero worship of Sarah Palin, who can barely string a sentence together in coherent English, to its elevation of other satirical figures like Michelle Bachman and Glenn Beck, and the marginalization of conservative intellectuals like David Frum and the almost religious denial of climate science, the right is headed down a road that if adopted by the country at large, would sink this country even further behind the rest of the western world, in technology, in scientific advancement, and in economic development.

The war on teachers, and the “Christianization” of education — closely associated with radical anti-intellectualism, with a healthy dose of privatization-mania and union busting thrown in for good measure, state legislatures across this country, including recently in Florida, are using the Obama Education Department’s push for education reform as an excuse to gut union contracts and subject teachers to the mercy of private corporation-created standardized tests, stripping local school boards of the authority to write contracts, and effectively, vesting that power in the state capitol. At the same time, the right is pushing harder than ever to herd students into private, religious and corporate-run charter schools, including by passing laws finding ways to funnel public money into those schools, and state legislatures, like the one in Texas, are pushing for revisionist history and even the teaching of Biblical creationism (euphamistically called “intelligent design,“) in public schools.

Of course, not all of these groups are interrelated, but they do share some common features.

For one thing, they are all on some level being fueled by an incredibly effective convergence of right wing media and politics. Fox News is, for all intents and purposes, the communications arm of the Republican Party, not just of the conservative movement. And the outsized influence of conservative media figures, both on Fox and on talk radio, has pulled the political part of conservatism toward the extreme, rather than politics acting in contravention to the media excesses. In a normal world, the political and media arms would occupy parallel but separate universes, counteracting each other, since the media and politics have different goals (one to entertain and drive up ratings, and the other to govern) and since unlike political leaders, media stars can act without any responsibility for consequences other than ratings. That’s just not so on the right, where the politics is following the media off a cliff. That’s the point David Frum was making when he said he used to think Fox worked for conservatives, but it turns out to be the other way around. As a consequence, conservatism has become as hyperbolic and colorful as prime time TV, and that’s only encouraged supposed “movements” like the tea partiers to show off their extremism in the most attention-getting way possible, while freeing its members from the kind of inhibitions that normally would prevent a supposedly modern political movement from doing dumb, regressive things like this and this.

The right wing eruptions also appear to be contradictory, in that they claim to demand “smaller government,” while at the same time demanding the exemption of the “big government” Social Security and Medicare programs currently in use by a large percentage of the angry right, plus budget-busting ideas like tax cuts for the affluent (which includes them) and the invasion of various Muslim countries.

In reality, what these groups are pushing for is reduced federal power over the individual, not least of which because they no longer like the person who symbolizes federal power, Mr. Obama (for a host of reasons, many of them ideological or partisan, but some of them demonstrably racial,) combined with a push for dramatic increases in the power of state and governments to exert control over individuals, often with a goal of infusing their particular brand of Christianity into the daily lives of American citizens.

The authoritarian impulse that we saw on the right during the Bush administration, when these same population groups cheered things like torture, indefinite detention, “sneak and peek” searches, the TIPS “turn in your neighbors” program, pre-emptive war, and even federal intervention in the end of life decisions of individual private citizens, hasn’t gone away. On the contrary, it’s gone into hyperdrive with Obama in the White House, only this time, they want to shift the authoritarianism downward, to the state level, where proponents can use Republican control of state legislatures to implement a kind of corporatist, Christian sharia, that would be impossible to pull off via the unwieldy mechanisms of the federal legislature.

So is the right crazy? Yes indeed. But they do have to be taken seriously, because despite how loony toons they seem to the rest of us, the fact that actual politicians are actually listening to them and formulating policy based on their obsessions is something regular folks should worry about. Not for nothing, but that fact should also provide all the motivation liberals, moderates, Democrats and Independents should require, to go to the polls this year to keep the Republicans, who are in such thrall to the “mad right,” from taking control of Congress, where they could restart the push to bring the authoritarian craziness back to Washington.

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2 Responses to “Has the right gone mad? You betcha”

  1. (Video) Sheriff: Arizona has become the ‘mecca for prejudice and bigotry.” : The Reid Report on January 8th, 2011 11:27 pm

    [...] Flashback: has the right gone mad? [...]

  2. Sheriff: Arizona has become the ‘mecca for prejudice and bigotry.” | Daily Police Report on January 28th, 2011 1:17 pm

    [...] Flashback: has the right gone mad? Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said Giffords was the target of a gunman whom he described as mentally unstable and possibly acting along with an accomplice. He said Giffords was among 13 people wounded in the melee that killed six people, including Arizona’s chief federal judge, a 9-year-old girl and an aide for the Democratic lawmaker. He said the rampage ended only after two people tackled the gunman.Doctors were optimistic about Giffords surviving as she was responding to commands from doctors despite having a bullet go through her head. “With guarded optimism, I hope she will survive, but this is a very devastating wound,” said Dr. Richard Carmona, the former surgeon general who lives in Tucson. [...]

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