"Well, the Nazis were against big business--they hated big business...They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working...they banned smoking. They were for abortion and euthansia..and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare."
--Rush Limbaugh
"History will equate this as, as big as the New Deal or Pearl Harbor."
--Glenn Beck
"Now America's universal nightmare is inching closer and closer to becoming a reality."
--Sean Hannity
In times when right wing frothing strikes some as a sign of the oncoming dissolution of our republic, it helps to ask two questions: 1/ Is this really anything new? Are politics any less civil than the American Republic as seen before? 2/ Should we really be surprised or worried about the rabid right wing radio entrepeneurs, foaming at the mouth, or should we be worried about who is listening to them?
One of the comforting aspects about history is it can be very reassuring sometimes. I can say this because, beyond high school, I have never taken a history course. But I have lived through what my children are now taught as history: The Civil Rights movement, The War in Vietnam, The Peace Movement. So I can understand the description of history as one long argument. Certainly, the way these things are described in some textbooks (especially Texas textbooks) strike me as some part of the story, but I remember more of the story.
Over forty-five years ago, Richard Hofstader ruminated about the paranoid style in American Politics in an essay in Harper's Magazine.
"The sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy...has a greater affinity for bad causes than good."
But, he observes, "Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content...The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life."
He quotes Senator Joseph McCarthy, speaking in 1951: "How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man."
Sound familiar?
Even the rhythm is very Limbaugh.
And Rush often places that conspiracy as out to get not just the country, but to get Rush Limbaugh personally. He often stokes his fans with the refrain those black forces are trying to shut him up, to destroy him, and he does not even have to say why. We all know why: Because only Rush stands between us and the forces of darkness. Were it not for the crusading RL, the forces of evil just might prevail.
Hofstader quotes a Texas newspaper article of 1855: "It is a notorious fact that [evil forces] are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil and religious institutions...We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber."
While disclaiming any expertise in psychology, Hofstadter cannot help conjecturing about the appeal of this approach; the people who respond, after all are having their psychological buttons pushed by the Limbaughs, the Hannity's, the Becks of talk radio. Why do they respond? What makes them feel dispossessed?
Hofstader encapsulates the mantra:
"The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots."
Key to this formula is a reference to history. Senator McCarthy and his soul mate, Robert H. Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, found it essential and useful to trace the roots of perfidy back to the establishment of the income tax, to other past betrayals which were not recognized at the time, but which now are exposed by the right wing patriots, who, through their own special genius, can identify where the badness started.
Two key characteristics which attach to this performance are the assumption of the role of renegade and pedant.
"There is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid's archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory"
Then there is the pedantry, which is so evident, almost comically evident, in Glen Beck and Limbaugh.
"Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments," and then marshalls "evidence." McCarthy's 96 page pamphlet McCathyism had 313 footnote references. Welch's assault on Eisenhower had 100 pages of bibliography and notes.
"We are all sufferers from history," Hofstader concludes, "But the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."
And that is the crucial insight. It's the departure from reality which makes Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity so appealing to their audience. The audience somehow gets off on their swelling fear, on the shared paranoia.
I think of the images of those crowds which line the roads as Hitler drives by in his open car, his arm held out in the Nazi salute, and the frenzy among the crowds, especially among the women, returning his salute, screaming, tears running down their faces.
Some roman emperor talked about the importance of giving the people circus. I'm not exactly sure what he was talking about--as I said, I'm no historian--but I can imagine. Circus is what right wing talk radio gives you.
It's what gets you from a health care bill which forbids an insurance company from refusing to honor your contract as soon as you need it honored, to apocalyptic imprecations about communism, Nazism, Hitler, government take over, jackbooted government agents arriving in black helicopters to drag your wife and daughter out of their beds and rape them in front of you and then slit their throats before they slit yours.
The interesting thing is this: Republicans have built their brand on the idea they are the brave ones. They have the guts to defend this country against those lily liver-ed Democrats who don't have the guts to throw the bad guys in jail or shoot the terrorists down where they live. The Republicans have, for decades, since Reagan really, cast themselves as John Wayne sitting tall in the saddle and the Democrats are wimpy gay guys--Truman Capote who could never throw a punch, much less aim a gun.
But here you have the Democrats telling everyone, "It's going to be all right. We'll pass this bill and the sky will not fall. We'll be just fine. We'll be better. We just need the courage to try."
And you've got John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, and Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and Sean Hannity all wringing their hands and howling in horror, seized by fear.
That is why Obama's talk in Iowa, after signing the health care bill was so devastating to the paranoid right. There he was, in his calm, understated way, talking about how he signed the bill and heard birds chirping, and he looked out the window, and it was a pretty day in Washington. And the crowd roared with laughter. They knew what he was doing. He was saying, "I got this." Don't worry.
And all the Republicans, who merrily cut taxes into the big deficits have suddenly got religion and are talking about how our children and grandchildren will sink beneath the tsunami of our debt. And I'm thinking, no, actually not. The economy will come back and tax revenues will pick up and the deficit will get paid down--just the way it did under that Democrat Clinton. And it will be all right.
Except now there will be healthcare. Health care, Medicare and Social Security. And the Republicans will try, when they get back into power to privatize (which is to say to kill) all three, again. They will try to make your social security a stock market investment, again.
Because, don't you know? Government is the problem, not the solution.
Saint Ronald Reagan told me that. Let's put his picture on the ten dollar bill.
Who was that guy Hamilton anyway? Big government guy, central government guy. Anti-states rights guy. We could have had Virginia dollars and Nevada dollars if it weren't for Hamilton. Now all we got is these federal dollars.
Am I the only one to see this? They want to shut me up. I think I hear the black helicopters over my roof now.
Luckily, the Supreme Court says I have a right to my own private arsenal. So I gotta go now. My M-16 and grenade launchers and sting missles are down in the basement.
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