http://www.alternet.org/democracy/139825/the_far_right%27s_first_100_days%3A_getting_more_extreme_by_the_dayThe Far Right's First 100 Days: Getting More Extreme by the DayBy Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future. Posted May 6, 2009.
Their talk is turning ugly, and it's not unthinkable that we could be in for a wave of domestic terrorism unseen since the mid-'90s. Sometime back in February, about three weeks into Barack Obama's administration, everybody on the left suddenly noticed that there was something different going on with the conservatives. The outrageous screeds and paranoid delusions sounded pretty much as they always had -- but there was a new fury behind them, a strident urgency that hadn't been there before, and a very audible shift of the gears in right-wing behavior and rhetoric.
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Ready ...The far right wing has been laying the groundwork for violent action for decades. Long before they turn dangerous, political and religious groups take their first steps down that road by adopting a worldview that justifies eventual violent action. The particulars of the narrative vary, but the basic themes are always the same:
First: Their story is apocalyptic, insisting that the end of the world as we've known it is near.
Second: It divides the world into a Good-versus-Evil/Us-versus-Them dualism that encourages the group to interpret even small personal, social or political events as major battles in a Great Cosmic Struggle -- a habit of mind that leads the group to demonize anyone who disagrees with them. This struggle also encourages members to invest everyday events with huge existential meaning, and as a result sometimes overreact wildly to very mundane stuff.
Third: This split allows for a major retreat from consensus reality and the mainstream culture. The group rejects the idea that it shares a common future with the rest of society, and curls up into its own insular worldview that's impervious to the outside culture's reasoning or facts.
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Set ...What's different now?
Plenty of things -- all of which, taken together, strongly suggest a group that's just about done talking and is beginning to organize itself to act.
First: There's been a shift in rhetoric. Over at Orcinus, Dave Neiwert and I have argued for years (with plenty of expert support from social psychologists) that strong words are often a thought rehearsal, a premonition of possible strong action to come. It's not that people always act on the rhetoric -- they don't. It's that when the actions do come, you find that there's usually been plenty of very hot rhetoric tossed around in the run-up, as people psych themselves up for battle.
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When Sean Hannity runs a poll asking whether his viewers prefer a military coup, secession or armed rebellion -- and armed rebellion wins -- that's evidence of this kind of shift. Right-wing talkers have built careers out of demonizing liberals; but when they start talking about what specific steps should be taken against them, that's not something we should ignore.
Second: There's been a quantum leap in the sheer down-the-rabbit-hole surreality of their beliefs about the world. Bloggers have been pointing out for years that conservatives have zero compunction about making shit up; but in the past, their prevarications were almost always built around a kernel of fact, wrapped in thick layers of distortion, mis-attribution or lies of omission. What's new in the past 100 days is that we're now seeing stories that are just flat-out fabulation, without even so much as a nod to reality. They're not even bothering to try to attach these claims to any kind of truth. Their fantasies are so much truthier to them.
Up is down. Black is white. Obama's not a citizen, he's going to take our guns, Congress is about to legalize incest ... this we believe, and there is no expert and no amount of real-world evidence that can ever convince us otherwise.
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