Infants Playing with Flamethrowers

Harold Meyerson nails it:

Dangerous outcomes from a culture of paranoia: Last October, Glenn Beck was musing on his radio show about the

prospect of the government seizing his children if he didn't give them

flu vaccines. "You want to take my kids because of that?" he said.

"Meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson."

Last April, Erick Erickson, the managing editor of the right-wing

RedState blog and a CNN commentator, was questioning the legality of

the Census Bureau's American Community Survey on a radio show. "We

have become, or are becoming, enslaved by the government. . . . I dare

'em to try to come to throw me in jail. I dare 'em to. [I'll] pull out

my wife's shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared

at the door."

Do right-wing talk show commentators incite violence against the

government? Feel free to draw your own conclusions - but to dwell on

the rise of violent rhetoric on the right is to miss an even bigger,

though connected, problem. Let's focus, rather, on the first part of

Beck's and Erickson's observations: The government wants to take away

Glenn Beck's (and by extension, your) kids. The government wants to

take a census and will throw Erick Erickson (and by extension, you) in

jail if he, and you, don't comply.

Can we see the hands of all the kids taken from their parents because

they didn't get flu shots? How about all those people rotting in jail

because they didn't cooperate in compiling the census?

The primary problem with the political discourse of the right in

today's America isn't that it incites violence per se. It's that it

implants and reinforces paranoid fears about the government and

conservatism's domestic adversaries.

Much of the culture and thinking of the American right - the

mainstream as well as the fringe - has descended into paranoid

suppositions about the government, the Democrats and the president.

This is not to say that the left wing doesn't have a paranoid fringe,

too. But by every available measure, it's the right where conspiracy

theories have exploded....

[T]he imputation of lurking totalitarianism, alien ideologies, and

subversion of liberties to liberals and moderates has become the

default rhetoric of the right. Never mind that Obama is a Marxist, a

Kenyan and an advocate of sharia law. Consider the plight of poor Fred

Upton, the Republican congressman just installed as chairman of the

House Energy and Commerce Committee, over considerable right-wing

opposition. According to Beck, Upton is "all socialist," while Rush

Limbaugh calls him the personification of "nannyism" and "statism."

Upton's crime is that he supports more energy-efficient light bulbs.

How that puts him in a league with Marx, Engels and Nanny McPhee, I

will leave to subtler minds.

American politics and culture have a rich history of paranoia, as

historian Richard Hofstadter and many others have documented. Many of

the incidents of anti-government violence over the past couple of

years - flying a plane into an IRS building in Texas, shooting police

officers in Pittsburgh and carrying out last weekend's savagery in

Tucson - came from people who, however individually loony they may

have been, also harbored paranoid visions of the government that

resembled, though by no means entirely, those put forth by the Becks

and the Ericksons.

That doesn't make Beck, Erickson, Rupert Murdoch and their ilk

responsible for Tucson. It does make them responsible for promoting a

paranoid culture that makes America a more divided and dangerous

land.