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Glenn Beck, also on Fox, spoke for most on the right when he dismissed the shooter as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Those who showed up with assault rifles at presidential health care rallies that summer were similarly minimized as either solitary oddballs or overzealous Second Amendment patriots. Few cared when The Boston Globe reported last fall that the Secret Service was overwhelmed by death threats against the president as well as a rise in racist hate groups and antigovernment fervor. It’s no better now. In a cover article last month, Barton Gellman wrote in Time that the magazine’s six-month investigation found that “the threat level against the president and other government targets” is at its highest since the antigovernment frenzy that preceded Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
While Obama-hatred remains a staple of the right, the ebbing of his political clout may have diminished him as a catchall for America’s roiling, inchoate rage. The president is no longer the sole personification of evil. For those who see government as Public Enemy No. 1, other targets will do, potentially some as remote from Washington as Oklahoma City.
Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist who has written a new book on Beck, has been tracking the case of Byron Williams, a bank robber on parole who injured two California Highway Patrol officers in a July shootout. Williams was out to start a revolution, his mother said, because “Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.” But instead of picking Congress as his target, Williams was gunning for progressives closer to home, at the Tides Foundation and A.C.L.U. in San Francisco. The Tides Foundation? It’s an obscure nonprofit whose agenda includes education and AIDS prevention. But it’s not obscure to Beck fans, who heard him single it out for vilification 29 times in the 18 months before Williams grabbed his gun.
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Don’t expect the extremism and violence in our politics to subside magically after Election Day — no matter what the results. If Tea Party candidates triumph, they’ll be emboldened. If they lose, the anger and bitterness will grow. The only development that can change this equation is a decisive rescue from our prolonged economic crisis. Not for the first time in history — and not just American history — fear itself is at the root of a rabid outbreak of populist rage against government, minorities and conspiratorial “elites.”
So far neither party has offered a comprehensive antidote to our economic pain. The Democrats have fallen short, and the cynics leading the G.O.P. haven’t so much as tried. We shouldn’t be surprised that this year even a state as seemingly well-mannered as Connecticut has produced a senatorial candidate best known for marching into a wrestling ring to gratuitously kick a man in the groin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/opinion/17rich.html?_r=1&hp
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