That was inappropriate of me...
Aug. 10th, 2009 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIf Rush Limbaugh and company want to encourage his followers to wear a t-shirt (the uniform of the common man) to his various events as a way of making the point that "there are a lot of us," he can do that. They can even pick a striking color like yellow or orange or something, or maybe they'll go with the tried-and-true red, white and blue. They could even be cute and turn it upside down.
I should not have made the Brownshirt joke, for the same reason that the various birthers and teabaggers should not be going around with Nazi symbols on their posters and placards. The Nazis really were evil; if we're going to hold them as images of fundamental evil, we shouldn't bleach out the efficacy of Nazi imagery by cheapening it in this way.
My apologizing for it, however, doesn't mean the right won't keep doing it.
America has always been a place, at least during my lifetime, where political violence was damn near unthinkable. I worry that what the extremists have learned, over the years, is that political violence works. Before the Internet and the 24 hour news cycle of cable television, we heard about bombings and terrorism in distant countries and had no concept of its effectiveness. Now we do, and you know what? It's pretty damned effective. It hurts a lot of people, but if you don't care that much about the other side, if you're convinced the other side is demonic and deserving of death, political violence seems like an excellent tactic.
The eliminationist rhetoric and pureblind scare tactics coming out of the right are stunning. When Newt Gingrich supports Sarah Palin's claim that health care reform will lead to euthanizing disabled children, he's allowed to get away with this blatant lie, and when Business Daily says that "Under the UK system, Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die," few people on the right will point out that Hawking is and always has been a UK citizen and seems to be surviving just fine.
I've never understood why the Nazis are the canonical bad guys, and not Pol Pot or Stalin or Japan's Unit 731. But they're what we've got. It's unfortunate how many dupes there are on the right, and how unwilling they are to listen.
An anonymous blogger wrote to Andrew Sullivan:
I should not have made the Brownshirt joke, for the same reason that the various birthers and teabaggers should not be going around with Nazi symbols on their posters and placards. The Nazis really were evil; if we're going to hold them as images of fundamental evil, we shouldn't bleach out the efficacy of Nazi imagery by cheapening it in this way.
My apologizing for it, however, doesn't mean the right won't keep doing it.
America has always been a place, at least during my lifetime, where political violence was damn near unthinkable. I worry that what the extremists have learned, over the years, is that political violence works. Before the Internet and the 24 hour news cycle of cable television, we heard about bombings and terrorism in distant countries and had no concept of its effectiveness. Now we do, and you know what? It's pretty damned effective. It hurts a lot of people, but if you don't care that much about the other side, if you're convinced the other side is demonic and deserving of death, political violence seems like an excellent tactic.
The eliminationist rhetoric and pureblind scare tactics coming out of the right are stunning. When Newt Gingrich supports Sarah Palin's claim that health care reform will lead to euthanizing disabled children, he's allowed to get away with this blatant lie, and when Business Daily says that "Under the UK system, Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die," few people on the right will point out that Hawking is and always has been a UK citizen and seems to be surviving just fine.
I've never understood why the Nazis are the canonical bad guys, and not Pol Pot or Stalin or Japan's Unit 731. But they're what we've got. It's unfortunate how many dupes there are on the right, and how unwilling they are to listen.
An anonymous blogger wrote to Andrew Sullivan:
For most of your time in America, this insanity has been muted by the success of conservative politics. Since you live in Washington, you probably saw daily the face of the successful conservative political establishment that milked the populist right, and by milking them kept their bitterness at a manageable level. That safety valve was stuffed up by George Bush's failed presidency.I suspect that's closer to the truth than we'd like to hear.
So now, these people are facing their worst fears; actual change.
They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.
These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.
