If you didn’t watch last night’s “Countdown,” just catch the conversation between Keith Olbermann and Eugene Robinson on the Conservative Political Action Conference. My only quibble is that the participants are not getting crazy. This is who they are.
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Dave Neiwert explains how the Right is dreaming of a Road Warrior scenario in which civilization utterly collapses. This is not what they fear; it’s what they want.
So far their “resistance” amounts to talking to themselves and holding their little “tea parties.” But we’re going to be very, very lucky if there aren’t some nasty incidents of domestic terrorism coming from the Right in the next couple of years.
I mention child abuse — the righties have found a 13-year-old boy whose little pubescent brain has been thoroughly pickled in rightwing propaganda. The child gave a two-minute talk at CPAC, which essentially amounted to his standing on a podium and vomiting up all the crap he’s been fed all his life.
And maybe next year CPAC will feature a two-minute talk by a parrot. It would amount to the same thing.
Did you check out Jonathan’s lapel pin?..Oh, brother! I was a teenage conservative. When the little twerp was bumping his gums about the virtues of being conservative and their mindless adhesion to senseless principles, I was reminded of watching the video of the English contractor( whose name now escapes me) who was taken captive in Iraq and was going to be beheaded unless an exchange for female Iraqi prisoners could be arranged. Watching that old man beg to Tony Blair for his life was a gut wrenching experience. But what was more revolting was watching Tony Blair kiss him off onto death with a ” sorry old chap, but we have principles” response. When you embrace a rigid adherence to principles, without summoning wisdom, you trade off power and lose your humanity.
Oh, and you liberals who insist on referring to Joe as a plumber are showing your bias. Joe is an accomplished Journalist/ war correspondent and your refusal to acknowledge his achievement just shows how petty you liberal are being.
Those David is describing are only part of the Right, the absolute nutty extreme. Most conservatives would be put off by them. (I have nothing much good to say about conservatives, but not all espouse this thinking).
Speaking of youth, check this out.
http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2009/02/like-athena-from-zeus-he-was-born-fully.html
Long story short: one of the sponsors of this year’s CPAC is the Youth for Western Civilization. I checked their facebook page and it says they’re tying to creat a “right-wing youth movement” to fight for liberty against leftist occupation. Their crest is an arm holding a fasces (or at least an axe that looks an awful lot like a friggin’ fasces!) SPLC notes that the group’s founders have flirted with groups like VDare, American Renaissance, Jared Tayler, etc.
A couple of days ago, at a speaking event at American University sponsored by the group, Tom Tancredo suggested that immigrants need to adapt to “white, anglo-saxon culture”.
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/02/27/tom-tancredo-suggests-immigrants-to-america-must-adopt-white-anglo-saxon-culture/
Hume’s Ghost: thanks for the first link. The Teutonic imagery is certainly reminiscent of Nuremberg rallies.
I know many right wingers are inspired by end times (Left Behind) liturgy, but I’m struck by echos of Spengler appearing in their statements. At heart, despite their rhetoric, the right wingers have become very darkly pessimistic. Was it David Brooks who said they’re becoming nihilistic? Very odd. I would laugh, and I do sometimes, but they’re playing with fire.
I remember when Barry Goldwater was considered the right wing fringe. As other Republicans drifted right, Goldwater began to appear almost normal and it was Pat Buchanan who appeared to epitomize the fringe. Now Buchanan seems quaint compared to the new level of right wing lunacy. Limbaugh as the defender of the U.S. Constitution? Right wing Republicans have gone way beyond Alice in Wonderland.
Right wingers may be misreading what’s going on in the world but they’re not misreading their own emotions: they’re very angry and feel very threatened by something. And they’re ripe for an authoritarian leader who can give them a satisfying explanation for it all. There are ways to crank down the authoritarian dynamic. I’ve never seen anyone more capable of cranking down that dynamic than Barack Obama, but other people, moderates and progressives, and even rational conservatives need to learn how to crank down that dynamic as well. It’s done by reminding people of our similarities and not our differences. Yes, I know, it’s not easy.
I was a teenage conservative.
Well, I really was, back in the early 1970s, so there may be hope for young Jonathan yet.
I wonder if there’s a page on Michael Steele’s Blackberry that reads:
SHORT LIST FOR 2012
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Sarah PalinSamuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher
Bobby Jindal
Jonathan Krohn
It must suck to be Republican these days.
Clearly I see these people as total and complete loons. They keep on going on about “principles,” without elaborating on what these “principles” are. The only detail they ever talk about is reducing taxes, which as Eugene Robinson says has been tried before – for nearly 30 years with disastrous results! Can anyone tell me what on earth they are talking about? I have an open mind, I am always open to a new solution, but is cutting taxes for rich people really the only “principle” that makes up this great “conservative†foundation?
I had the distinct displeasure to watch C-Span’s Washington Journal this morning and watch the great “conservative” Michelle Malkin. The television program seemed odd, she kept on looking off camera half way through her answer. The only substance she could muster was, “government never creates jobs…” (I can tell her that I’m currently attempting to find a job in the government – there are not very many), or “bring back small government…” the Republicans are a party that recently went through the biggest increase in government spending in America’s history! This new spending impacted improved the lives of our wealthy.
More broadly, I find these people so curious. Where do these people come from? Who are they? Wasn’t Rush Limbaugh the son of a well to do lawyer in a small town in Missouri? Didn’t he enjoy growing up in the middle class society created by our Democratic Presidents? To me it is just a paradox, while on the one hand they enjoyed wonderful government services as they grew up in America, on the other they will not be content until they destroy it all. I can’t comprehend it.
I have vague recollections of righties accusing progressives of “treason” for simply speaking out against Bush’s policies. But gaming out the violent overthrow of the government on live TV is ok? I like to think I can see multiple sides of a discussion, but these people live in a mental space that I don’t understand at all.
And to think, Pat Buchanon is now a voice of moderation and calm in this insanity.
Goldwater would be with the rest of us.
I think the Conservative movement for the last 40 years is like an addiction, in that it takes higher and higher, or larger and larger, doses of insanity to get the same high.
The leaders of this movement don’t come from the hoi polloi. they are frequently children of privlidge, like Rush, or many of the Congresscritters and business leaders. They raise the rabble not to share the gains with them, but to exploit them for their own means – and that is to grab all of the wealth and power for themselves, at the expense of all others.
Ok, I hate to do this, but look at the leaders in the Bolschevik pary like Lenin. Look at many of those in the 1920’s and ’30’s movements in Italy and Germany. This is what happened there.
Until the followers see Rush and the other leaders for what they are, we are in for a long hard winter of right-wing discontent, In other words, acts of terror. They will push for (again, I hate to use the term, but it’s true) a facist solution to what they see as the problem – the rest of us. They will become what they decry.
We must be ready to point this out to the rest of the country. Not after the fact, but beginning NOW!
My snark is little Jonathan at 13 is head and shoulders above not-Joe the not-Plumber, who is in the prime of his adulthood.
My unsnark follows on from c u n d gulag. Exactly how do Olbermann and Robinson think people such as Hitler and company came to power? They WERE seen as crazy and insane and a laughing stock and a joke. Until hard times in the depression and a lack of any other serious solution suddenly brought them center stage. (But of course we are nowhere near in a depression, so we have nothing to worry about. Just keep shopping…)
Bush may have been a dangerous idiot but he wasn’t insane. The remaining crew are NUTS – they are driving the sane people away, and that is fine with them – listen to what Rush has to say – he WANTS that. They are absolutely convinced they are right, and they alone see the truth, those who don’t agree are wimpy sellouts. Look at their whole underlying m.o. They don’t negotiate with political opponents, they neuter them. Neiwart has been saying for a long time these folks have an eliminationist mindset. This is what we are increasingly seeing. Out of what sort of mindset does anyone feel that great ideas like The Final Solution, and Pol Pot, and Rwanda came from? People dreamed that stuff up. Of course it sounded crazy. How could anyone take it seriously? But they did it anyway. We need to pay attention to what is going on. Think about the crowds at McCain/Palin rallies last summer. You don’t see where the American version of Hitler’s Brownshirts is potentially coming from?
It was difficult to watch Robinson in the video blowing it all off as a crazy joke. Because he doesn’t understand what he is seeing. This is not funny.
It is quite amazing that we have a president like Obama at this time, but Obama is also going to trigger their worst nightmares – a President who sees things very differently than they do, and who is not going to cower or acquiesce . We won’t see states secede in the 21st century, but we will see growing numbers of individuals secede psychologically, effectively go underground in total alienation, and envisioning them performing what sane people will see as acts of terrorism is not very hard to picture. They of course will see themselves as the only true patriots – think of it as the children of Ollie North.
The Nazi Party pre-1932 was nowhere close to a majority party, was seen as crazy by normal people. Fortunately we have different cultural traditions in the US than Germany did at that time. We have a long history of freedom and expression here. I am hopeful that in the end enough people here will realize what these dangerous people want to do is take all of that away, in the name of their ideas about “freedom” and “free enterprise”. A group of determined half-crazies with an ideology they believe is ultimate truth, and who feel only those who see things as they do are worthy of having all that we have here is a dangerous thing. Hitler said many crazy things. People thought he was politicking. Years later they discovered all along he had meant every word of it.
Pay attention.