Untempered adversity | Michael Tomasky

Sorry about yesterday, gang. I had to go to New York, and I was planning on blogging on the train. The Acela has wifi now. Well, they have wifi in theory. In practice things are somewhat more complicated.

On the way up, it took about (not exaggerating) four to five minutes to load a page. I finally got this page I'm looking at right now loaded (i.e., the page in the Guardian remote tools system on which I actually type these posts) after considerable waiting. I wrote about 200 words of a post, pressed save: and the screen went dead.

On the way home, I got online quickly, but it refused to let me visit any site except the Amtrak welcome page, which sort of put a damper on my researches. Every site I tried to visit, it looked for about one second as if it was going there, and then zoom, back to the Amtrak "Let's get started!" page. And I don't think it was just me. The two people I was riding up with had problems similar to mine, one of them able to fight through the cyber-molasses, the other not. IE, Firefox, didn't matter. They have a few kinks to work out. But they do offer far more leg room than the Eurostar, as previously discussed.

Anyway, reduced as I was to old media, I actually read a physical copy of The New Yorker, which contained this fine essay by the historian Sean Wilentz on the Tea Party movement and the historical transformation of right-wing extremism over the last 50 years from something shunned by "respectable" conservatism to something embraced and encouraged and applauded by it.

Read it. You will see where these "ideas" of people like Glenn Beck come from, and how truly crackpot they are. Crackpot. And made up, either out of whole cloth or out of a paranoid reordering and reinterpretation of a few loose facts. It's really pretty sobering. Wilentz:

[Glenn] Beck's version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the Birch Society's founder, Robert Welch. The political universe is, of course, very different today from what it was during the Cold War. Yet the Birchers' politics and their view of American history—which focussed more on totalitarian threats at home than on those posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China—has proved remarkably persistent. The pressing historical question is how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew—and why, this time, Party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them.

Sean's answer to this question, bruited further down in the piece, is this:

Whatever misgivings may have arisen about him on the right, Reagan achieved a dramatic conservative overhaul of the federal tax code, a profound reconfiguring of the judiciary, and a near-victory for the West in the Cold War. From the standpoint of the mainstream right, the only problem with his legacy was that no other Republican could come close to matching his public appeal and political savvy. For the party of Reagan, his departure was the beginning of a long decline, and it is the absence of a similarly totemic figure, during the past twenty years, that has allowed the current resurgence of extremism.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with that. It's a factor. As I've written, George W. Bush was no Reagan, but his presence in the White House and certain things he did, like saying that we were not at war with Islam, kept the lid on some of the venomous craziness we've seen in the past few months.

But I say follow the money. Many prominent corporate titans in America since the 1920s have inveighed against the state and equated liberalism with socialism and then communism and sought (for their own comfort and bottom line, of course) to have the state stripped out of their lives like the bark off a tree. They've never been able to do it, for various reasons. Now they smell blood. This is not to say that the Tea Party is entirely orchestrated by corporate interests: merely that it is extremely convenient to them.

Anyway, we are in a truly crazy period, which we know, but I recommend this essay because it puts some meat on the bones of the general argument about why and how the modern right and GOP have become so extreme - what the sources are, and how those sources have been permitted to go mainstream.

US politicsTea Party movementMichael Tomasky
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