A Lunatic Fringe Poised to Take Power

Call me a masochist, but I have spent considerable time watching C-Span's coverage of the seemingly countless right wing events and rallies designed to electrify the right wing base in anticipation of the next elections.  If I did not have an innocent's basic trust of C-Span as an institution, I might conclude that they are intentionally drowning us in right wing propaganda.  It seems the right wing gets a lot more time.  I choose rather to conclude that C-Span is actually doing us a service by taking us into the belly of the right wing beast and letting us in on what they are really like, particularly when they are among friends and taking on the role of cheerleaders for the cause.     Newt Gingrich has the gift of being able to impersonate a rational human being.  He has assimilated some of the mannerisms of the liberal establishment only so that he can effectively turn those very mannerisms against their source.  In one recent speech, he stated that the 2012 election will be "the most important election since the election of 1860."  He did not elaborate, but given the tenor of his speech, one can speculate.  The election of 1860 gave us Abraham Lincoln and precipitated the firing on Fort Sumter.  I wonder, does Newt think the country would have been better off if Lincoln had lost?  It is worthwhile to revisit the 1860 election, in which, as it turned out, Lincoln won with only 40% of the popular vote, the remainder being divided between the Southern candidates, Breckinridge and Bell and Douglas, the Illinois Democrat.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860)

     There has been the growing sense, for a long time, but particularly since the election of our first Black president, that the right smells an opportunity not merely to roll back American history to the time before the New Deal, but to the time before the Civil War and Reconstruction.  (In the case of George Bush, we even seemed in danger of going back to a period before the Magna Carta of 1215 which established that the "law of the land" trumped the whims of the monarch. Aspects of Bush's magisterial overreach sadly linger in the Obama administration.)

     The passivity of the Democratic Party in recent years, its willingness to "compromise," (particularly since Arkansan Bill Clinton, supposedly the "first Black president," invited serious inroads into the hard-won protections of the New Deal such as the tearing up of Glass-Steagall), created an ideological vacuum which allowed heretofore unheard of incursions of what were once considered uniquely Southern manifestations such as "Bible Belt" evangelism and the generalized notion that the working class, even if it could not literally be enslaved, should be overseen by an aristocratic, neo-plantation-owner class that would keep them in line.  Thus, while, their darkest fantasies aside, no one would accuse the right of planning to reinstitute black slavery, a case can be made that some form of wage slavery would be just fine.   A nation which once fought a war (in which casualties by latest estimate numbered over 700,000 of its citizens) ostensibly not to end but to stop the spread of slavery outside of the deep South, now stands by as the values of the deep South threaten to engulf the entire nation.

      The right wing tantrum that we are currently being treated to goes largely without a response from whatever you want to call the vestigial "left" in this country.   Obama is portrayed as the anti-Christ, a foreigner, a socialist, anti-religion, anti-freedom.  Large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to put the right wing hate campaign in any perspective.  Many are poorly educated thanks to the decades long campaign against education in this country.  Even the minority who read anything are constantly being told that the mainstream media is controlled by the left (a laughable notion given who owns media in this country) and therefore not to be trusted.  Thus the cosmically disingenuous criticisms of Obama for not making more progress on the economy or giving us a health plan we could all greet with enthusiasm when lack of progress is the direct result of the Republican Party's brazenly announced strategy of gridlock.  The half a quadrillion in dervivatives still floating in the financial ether that were the result of amazing corporate greed made possible by shooting down all sane regulation are ignored.
      What had always been an undercurrent in our history, obvious even in the compromises which gave us our constitution, that is, the fear that democacy was equal to mob rule, has now become an overarching theme.  Undercurrents and once-thought-of as relatively innocuous palliatives such as agnostic Ike inserting "under God" into the pledge of allegiance have been reborn as mainstream thought.  History is daily being rewritten and carved into stone.   Even elementary school students were once taught, for example, that the founding fathers, children of the Englightenment, had been deists rather than members of any Protestant sect.  Now, however, Thomas Jefferson, a man as likely to believe in the divinity of Jesus as he might the tooth fairy, is being reconstrued as a devout Christian.  The combination of religious zealotry and its accompanying tendency to find science deeply suspect is responsible for the wholesale rewriting of our textbooks to ensure that future generations of American children will be able to envision Jefferson as a church-goer and dinosaur bones as bogus artifacts planted by left wing conspirators.  Aiding in this effort is the emergence of countless right wing "think tanks" having constant seminars with all the trappings of orthodox academia--the blue back drops with neatly printed logos, Q and A's with three questions at a time being taken from the floor, the right mix of old line WASP "hands" and neo-liberal cabalists.
     The current occupant of the White House has revealed himself to be not quite the "change" millions of Americans who have not yet drunk from the poisoned well had hoped for.  It would not be too extreme to state baldly that many feel duped by the 2008 election.  Election results in 2010 and in Massachusetts and the recent failed recall in Wisconsin are other disturbing possible harbingers of what can occur when large numbers of voters feel they were betrayed.  And the current Republican candidate seems relatively innocuous compare to, let's say, a Gingrich, a Santorum or a Palin.  But if the Republicans take the White House in November, the lunatic fringe in this country will go on a rampage.