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Political dueling is a gladiatorial exercise, but for viciousness, ad hominem and ad absurdum attacks, the American right wing has few competitors.
I'm not talking about the Congressional Republican Representative Joe Wilson who called President Obama a "liar" during Mr Obama's speech to both houses of Congress on health .
I'm not even talking about Sarah Palin insisting that part of Obama's healthcare reform package included what she called "Death Panels", or groups of bureaucrats convened to decide who would and wouldn't receive healthcare, and would be thus sentenced to death.
Politicians, after all, are like Gadarene swine, you expect them to be possessed by unholy spirits sometimes.
I'm talking about right wing surrogates like Fox News's Glen Beck who months ago was suggesting that concentration camps were being built by the government for ordinary Americans. Or perhaps Bill O'Reilly, also of Fox News, who used to call a Kansas doctor "George Tiller, the Baby Killer". That is until an anti-abortion zealot shot Tiller to death in his own church .
The monarch of right winger anger (and such statements are powered by a ferocity that is beyond mere politicking) is radio host Rush Limbaugh. One of his more temperate recent comparisons involved Obama's healthcare logo, which he said, resembled the Nazi party's.
Sores on the body politic, surely, but this leprosy shows little sign of remission. For several weeks now, I've been having an open ended chat with Graeme Hill during his radio show about the latest outrage on Fox News. I've diagnosed an absence of policy innovation within the GOP, a leadership vacuum in the political wing (which allows self-described rodeo stunt clowns like Beck to become the voice of the right wing), and an creeping awareness that the party is on the wrong side of demographic change in America.
I suppose I should add we're talking about the extremes of the right. Not the super extremes, go-back-on-the-gold-standard, Protocols-of-Zion nut bags, but common or garden lunatics.
By this I mean those who tend to believe, almost reflexively, that life as we know it may end because of this or that policy. You do sometimes feel that without the policy they would feel this anyway. The extreme right has also, as Christopher Hitchens once told me, "a tendency to the schismatic". Politics is less like a doctrine and more like a religion. Thus their political language is imbued with religious fervour.
A couple of times, Graeme has ended by playing the attack by Joseph Nye Welch, on Senator Joe McCarthy during the latter's witch trials. You can hear it here .
And though I've listened on each occasion, I found myself thinking the last time, a little peevishly, "Aren't you labouring the point?"
But Graeme was saying, "Look to history."
Something slipped into place as I was reading Jonathon Chiat's piece on Ayn Rand in The New Republic , a house journal for high-thinking liberals.
(Note: I don't get The Weekly Standard which would be its equivalent, though I do subscribe to The Atlantic, a monthly magazine that tends right. I'm afraid I'm schizophrenic in my views. I believe in... Oh, wait. There's little point in laying out my credentials as an even-minded person. Tone speaks a great deal. As you read this you may form your own views whether I'm a simpering liberal apologist, or one of the cognoscente.)
Ayn Rand's reputation rests largely as author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She believed that economic value was the sole measure of human achievement. Her books were written didactically; they describe how scintillating individualist heroes are punished by the soft-headed hoi polloi.
Rand hated Franklin D Roosevelt, and in 1940 campaigned for the Republican candidate Wendell Wilkie. Wilkie lost, and Rand prophesied, "a Totalitarian America, a world of slavery, of starvation, of concentration camps and of firing squads".
Snap!
This is pretty much what you get if you tune into right wing talk radio or telly nowadays. True, it's the natural paranoid mode of American politics. But what occurred to me, reading this is that something inherent in the ideas right wingers espouse: Freedom, wealth, individual responsibility, fiscal conservatism (though how they let George Bush spend like a modern day Sun King is beyond me) contains the germs of their greatest fears, i.e. dictatorship, scarcity, collectivism. This duly makes for the mud they sling.
Perhaps it is because right wingers have a Hobbesian (nasty, brutish and short) view of existence that explains why they believe so stridently in what they call common sense, and what Walter Benjamin might have labeled "crude thinking". I wonder if their interior world seeps out in the violence of their rhetoric.
There! Having tried to understand why the American extreme right consists of angry boors, my next sermon will be on why American liberals are such cringing milquetoasts. Amen.
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Post new commentNewzgal said on 2010-01-03 @ 15:46 NZDT: Report abusive post
Hi Tim, great blog. I agree right wingers have a Hobbesian view of existence, and like many I welcomed Obama’s presidency. However I always watched Fox News just to see how they were framing up the news (which far too many people rely on). I now find it more useful than ever to tune into the right just incase there is a kernel of truth in their rants as it seems the media and world have been far too soft on the new president and democrats, perfect recipe to slip things in!
jackdoitcrawford said on 2009-09-11 @ 23:24 NZDT: Report abusive post
Please don't label all people you disagree with, and put them in the same camp. Ayn Rand was pro abortion, achievement, reason, freedom, capitalism and happiness. She was definitely neither a conservative nor a libertarian. She also didn't want to live under a dictatorship. I see nothing wrong with this at all.
Kiwi in USA said on 2009-09-11 @ 17:58 NZDT: Report abusive post
I would have to disagree with Tim saying Bill ORielly is a right wing loon as if it were. He is defintly a independet and he always tells his viewers that. I know that there is plenty of loons like rush but come on, Obama is really turning America in the wrong direction. He has spent more money than all the presidents have combined. America is in trillions of dollars worth of debt.