Frank Rich: What The Right Fears Is the Erosion Of Its Social Position & Collapse Of Its Power

[kpete]

The Guns of August
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 22, 2009

.......................

This month the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same organization that warned of the alarming rise in extremist groups before the Oklahoma City bombing, issued its own report. A federal law enforcement agent told the center that he hadn’t seen growth this steep among such groups in 10 to 12 years. “All it’s lacking is a spark,” he said.

This uptick in the radical right predates the health care debate that is supposedly inspiring all the gun waving. Nor can this movement be attributed to a stepped-up attack by Democrats on this crowd’s holy Second Amendment. Since taking office, Obama has disappointed gun-control advocates by relegating his campaign pledge to reinstate the ban on assault weapons to the down-low.

No, the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Those on the right who defend the reckless radicals inevitably argue “The left does it too!” It’s certainly true that both the left and the right traffic in bogus, Holocaust-trivializing Hitler analogies, and, yes, the protesters of the antiwar group Code Pink have disrupted Congressional hearings. But this is a false equivalence. Code Pink doesn’t show up on Capitol Hill with firearms. And, as the 1960s historian Rick Perlstein pointed out on the Washington Post Web site last week, not a single Democratic politician endorsed the Weathermen in the Vietnam era.

more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/opinion/23rich.html

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. AKA it's shadow.

[Tansy_Gold]

2. The bogus Hitler analogies may not be so bogus. . . .

At least on the left.

I'm reading Jeff Sharlet's "The Family" right now, and the connections between Abram Vereide, founder of "The Family," and the Nazis are frightingly strong. And yes, I use the present tense intentionally.

As many of us here on DU have read in John Dean and Bob Altemyer, the right is most comfortable in an authoritarian society. They do not like change, they do not like insecurity. They like knowing where they are and that where they have been is the same place as where they are going. They do not like anything that is "different," because difference implies change and change makes them uncomfortable.

Back in the summer of 2000, before the catastrophe of the (s)election, I told a friend that I saw booosh as a potential to be another Hitler. "I do not know who his Jews will be, who he will try to annihilate, but there is something so absolutely terrifying about that man that I can only describe in those terms."

Hitler was the far right, the uber-conservative, the defender of the mythical and perfect past. How different, really, was he from the far right in this country today? Do we not all know someone, perhaps several someones, who believe all non-christians (by which they really mean Muslims but they'll include Jews as a matter of course) should at the very least be removed from American soil, regardless how long their families have been here? It's not a matter of trivializing Hitler; it's a matter of realizing that yes, it CAN happen here, and we need to remember as a warning to ourselves that we don't let it happen here.



Tansy Gold

[dionysus]

3. wonderful post, it would make a great thread.

:patriot:

[Tansy_Gold]

5. Maybe tomorrow.

Thanks!

:hi:

[dionysus]

6. sometimes the best nuggets of truth on DU are not the OPs, but responses therein.

:hi:

[creeksneakers2]

10. I believe we were heading down the road to fascism

up until 2006, and may get back on it soon.

1/3 of the country is hypnotized by propaganda. Rights have been infringed. Extraordinary powers have been claimed. Outrage is passing reason. The public gives large subsidies to private business.

I think the people on the right, and some on the left are crazy. But its not crazy to guard against excessive and uncontrolled power. The safe place to keep power before was with the people, but now they are becoming more and more of a threat themselves.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

13. My mother exclaimed

"oh no!" She wept in my arms on the apocalyptic night of *'s installment. Her sense of doom was well justified.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

16. I'm reading American Fascists by Chris Hedges,

The Nazi era dehumanization rhetoric applies to the Christian Right fantasy world and their determination to infiltrate and destroy the US gov't, replacing the Constitution with a "biblically" based totalitarianism.

The Nazi/Hitler -- republican/conservative/right-wing christian analogies are absolutely accurate.



To summarize Hedges, and what hit me between the eyes ---

In the Fundamentalist Christian right wing ideology, the world is divided into Us, the godly, and Them, the non-godly -- liberals, to use the broadest term for all of us who respect facts and reality. They create an other-world where facts are easily dismissed if they contradict the fantasy, and those who are not like them are not really human. Compassion is saved for those who are saved, while all others are reduced to abstractions, a deep well of scapegoathood where all believers may hurl their hatred and fear.

They see power, money and success as god's reward for their righteousness. They are extreme in their rapacious consumerism, which is again, god's blessing for their obedience to him.

They believe themselves immune to evil and so little by little, seeing all others as evil, they enact evil with no awareness of the real life consequences of what they do, nor of what they themselves have become. They are taught to long for a purification, a cleansing, again as an abstraction -- the ramping up of outrage, of their persecution complex and of their own inarguable godliness. Violent acts, one by one, anesthetize their human responses and then... a final solution can eventually become manifest.

His analysis emphasized to me the importance of responses like Barney Frank's recent application of unvarnished honesty... as Hedges said, extremists do not become extremists overnight. They test the waters, step by small step. Without opposition, without ordinary people standing up publicly and calling our their vile and despicable rhetoric for what it is, they learn to take one more step towards the final solution they long for.

[rocktivity]

4. Rocktivity: What The Right HAS YET TO COME TO TERMS WITH

Is the Erosion Of Its Social Position & Collapse Of Its Power

:headbang:
rocktivity

[yodermon]

7. also Code Pink never disrupted TOWN HALL meetings

(to my knowledge, I'll stand corrected if proven otherwise of course).

[creeksneakers2]

11. I was down on Code Pink all along

But the difference I see between Code Pink and the people now is that Code Pinkers were quickly arrested, while the folks now aren't, unless they get way way out of hand.

[yodermon]

15. right. Civil Disobedience means that you accept the consequences of your actions

i.e. get arrested / escorted out of the premises.

I wonder why that did not happen as much for the teabaggers, whose mission was to absolutely obstruct and prevent free discussion (and it worked in the cases of the canceled town halls). Code pink never had the same effect, not even close, because they didn't have Corporate support.

[moondust]

8. Yep.

It's the White Power people having fits over their losses and bleak future.

K/R.

[girl gone mad]

12. They always thought that..

secretly everyone agreed with them. I'm sure the election was a big shock.

[glowing]

14. You are right about them thinking everyone "secretly" thought the same way they did.

It shocks the shit out of them when I tell someone who lowers their voice and says something racist or think Pres. Obama is a socialist or should be shot. The almost fall back from me at the shock of me saying that would be the worst thing this country could ever experience, and that I'm a socialist.. Obama is not. Its like they can't believe a white girl doesn't agree with them, and then they are worried because now you know they are a racist idiot winger.. and that they are a lesser person.. when normally, they are someone who is supposed to be the "it" within their community.

[Delphinus]

9. Worth reading

Need to digest - but I think they really do fear their erosion of power. TruthDig (or Commondreams) had an article recently that talked about this very much. I'll see if I can find it for here.

[Cha]

17. Kickin'

:kick: