I recently finished reading Rick Perlstein’s book on the rise of Barry Goldwater. There will likely be a book review post about it in the near future, but for today I wanted to quote something which, though more than forty years old, speaks directly to our current political climate. This was an editorial in the newsletter of the American Legion that, in Perlstein’s words, “blasted the alarming rise in political extremism” in the early sixties [emphasis mine]:
I mean those individuals who would save American by forsaking its free institutions. I mean not just the Communists and neo-Fascists who openly assail our system but, more especially, those who, in the conviction that theirs is the only right view, have lost sight of – and faith in – the fundamental processes of self-government. They claim to have the one true answer to every problem. They talk of setting aside the law when the law offends them. They are quick to cry “treason,” slow to admit error, and indifferent to arguments and facts that do not support their beliefs. They are not really leftists or rightists – but simply anarchists.
That paragraph could just as easily have been written in 2009 as in 1963. For proof, here’s Michael Tomasky writing in the current New York Review of Books:
Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel are by now familiar even to people who never listen to or watch them. But if you don’t do so, you have no idea the extent to which they very directly fuel talk of socialism, and twist and sometimes invent information, and create scandals that keep their listeners agitated. To liberals, and to non-ideological Americans who might have heard of him, Cass Sunstein is a highly regarded Harvard law professor who might someday be a plausible Supreme Court nominee and who, if anything, is not a lockstep liberal on such matters as civil liberties. To consumers of the right-wing mass media, however, Sunstein is nothing short of a nut, who believes that meat-eating and hunting should be banned, that pets should be able to sue their owners, and that the government should order that organs be ripped fresh from the bodies of people who die in emergency rooms.
[…]
The charge against Sunstein was led by Fox’s Glenn Beck, who now, even more than Limbaugh, is the guru of this new right wing. Beck, famous for saying that Obama is a “racist” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture,” now has (on some nights anyway) more than three million viewers and has surpassed Bill O’Reilly as the leader among cable news hosts.[8]
[…]
These right-wing outlets—which include “news” Web sites like Newsmax and World Net Daily, the latter affiliated with Jerome Corsi, a writer connected with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—create a world in which their consumers have a reality presented to them that is completely at odds with the reality the rest of us live in.
In other words, the reality based community may have retaken the federal government, but fantasy based community still exists.
Much like today, the early sixties were a very harsh time for far right conservatives in this country. They saw America as under assault and teetering on the edge of utter ruin. They felt the Republican Party had abandoned them – these people loathed Eisenhower – and that they had no voice whatsoever. We are at a similar moment these days, not because the true righties think they’ve been shut out of the Republican Party, but because having gained complete control over the Republican Party they’ve seen it shut out of power.
Moreover, this is the moment when the largest number of people will be affected by that feeling of powerlessness. How terrible must it be to genuinely believe, as millions of Americans surely do, that health care reform will result in government death panels? No such thing is going to happen, and the years ahead will prove that out, but right now those fears are very real and are constantly reinforced by people like Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachmann. All the facts in the world can’t argue against the likes of them, the only thing that is going to calm the fears they so relentlessly exploit is the passage of time.
Proof of this can be found, ironically enough, in Medicare. The creation of Medicare was a hard fought victory over the intellectual ancestors of the people who are currently railing against health care reform. Yet today we have an ostensibly conservative senator, Charles Grassley, Republican from Iowa, calling Medicare part of the “social fabric of America”. It’s easy to point out the intellectual hypocrisy of that and move along, but it’s worth considering just how that rather odd situation came into being.
As it was being created Medicare was decried as socialism, communism and every other affront to the natural order of mom, apple pie and America. None of the scary predictions came even remotely true and here we are forty years later and it’s almost impossible to imagine mom, apple pie and America without Medicare. Time and a lack of catastrophe is the only thing that made that so.
Goofy, extremist right wing horseshit has been a cottage industry for more than fifty years now and it isn’t going to end. But once the sky fails to fall the positions taken by the extremists will slink back to the margins. Reality typically triumphs over fantasy, even if it sometimes takes years.
