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January 13, 2011
In Dangerous outcomes from a culture of paranoia in the Washington Post Harold Meyerson makes a good point about about the political rhetoric of the Right in the US. This populist conservatism sees politics in terms of being a war that has been started by the other side--- the liberals.
Steve Bell
Meyerson focuses on the conservative's political depiction of the other Americans as dark conspirators, as the enemy, or as as evil aliens in the vitriolic incivility of American political discourse, as heard on talk radio and cable channels such as Fox News. It is the paranoid characteristic of American political culture that he is interested in.
He says:
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.
The imputation of lurking totalitarianism, alien ideologies, and subversion of liberties to liberals and moderates has become the default rhetoric of the right. That doesn't make Beck, Palin or Rupert Murdoch and their ilk responsible for Tucson. But it does make them responsible for promoting a paranoid culture that makes America a more divided and dangerous land.
You can see that paranoia operating in Sarah Palin's response to the criticism of her warlike political rhetoric. This was more than using the language ---eg., "blood libel"--- designed to grab headlines. For Palin it is the criticism of her violent rhetoric that's the problem, not the violent rhetoric itself. She is the victim---nay a martyr (I am a persecuted and righteous innocent). She was simply “speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent.” The pundits who attacked her were “those who embrace evil and call it good.” That puts her in the middle of a cosmic struggle, with the forces of evil arrayed against her.
The killing of six innocents and the injuring of 14 more including a Congresswoman are a mere backdrop to her perceived continued victimization by the amorphous liberal establishment who embrace evil. 'They'-- the liberals, nay the socialists in the government and the media --- are trying to silence her. Her suffering is in the same order as the Jews in medieval Christian Europe. That's paranoia---she is in a cosmic struggle, with the forces of evil arrayed against her.
This apocalyptic tone tosses civility in politics out the window. The political divide has become so sharp that everything is now black and white: eg., for Palin her critics are using nasty words to incite violence against here.
Fear sells. Republicans believe they have the majority of the public on their side and that the Obama agenda is an attempt to change America against the will of the people. However, the key to who will win in 2012 is probably the economy.
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"For Palin it is the criticism of violent rhetoric that's the problem, not the violent rhetoric".
Just the same, you get the feeling that the red state heartland are complicit in this, like our own Hansonists.
They virtually demand, through their behaviours alone, this of their politicians.
Yes, "the system" over time has messed with us as humans by de-educating us and playing on our fears, sense of guilt and weaknesses, during an era of de-industrialisation and poorly managed labor importation patterns coupled with soc sec clamps.
So as you have said, the politicians now come to "manage the decline". Big business wants easy access to markets or resources, so the imperialism. It wants union busting and cheap substitute labor, so the politicians "manage the decline".
The mode for acheivemt of elite goals appears to be through the proliferation of a central meme, for want of a better term, that society is "out of control" and we all become survivalists.
So we have deluded Sarah Palin and her trog followers out rushing after imaginary grizzly bears with automatic shotguns and armalite sub machine guns, but reaching the root, I can see it terms of night terrors and scared little children- which is a great shame and fertile territory for further trigger happy mindsets to act out their delusions.
An indication of this comes in consideration of the "victimhood/ entitlement" attitude buttonholed by Hugh Mackay and others during the overt phase of our own Hansonism, back a decade.
All Jubilation T. Cornpone/ Chicken Little stuff and stock in trade of conservative populists.
But as "Dr Strangelove" made clear so many years ago, the US and its people have pretty big matches to start fires, for people ultimately no more (or less) sophisticated than tribals in the less explored boondoggles of the tropics.
And when we laugh at these for their "cargo cult" beleifs, incidentally, how little we realise how hard a superior intelligence would be simultaneously laughing at us, for the same reasons.