I see much, much commentary seeking to establish that the right wing rhetoric is more prone to violent imagery, violent fantasies and outright wishes and urgings toward violence. For purposes of this diary, I take all of that as a given, and use it as my point of departure.
What interests me today is not that they are more violent, in thought, word and deed, than us. Rather, I want to understand WHY they are that way. What is really going on here? What is the dynamic?
There is no simple answer, but to a large extent it boils down to this: right wing ideology is dominated by fear and anger, victimhood (perceived) and scapegoating.
It is no secret that the right wing operates in what has been called the "paranoid style." (Richard Hofstadter originted the phrase, I believe, in his classic article "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," Harper's Magazine, November 1964.) That has been true for a very long time, much longer ago than 1964. In fact, I would suggest that it is so prevalent on the right, it is pretty much a functional definition of what is, and isn't right-wing.
Here is Hofstader describing the basic characteristics of the paranoid political operative:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
He describes an extreme case, of course. Not everyone on the right is insane, and many are prefectly well aware of the absurdity of the positions touted and the rhetoric used to do so. But the point is that the overall discourse on the right tends to run along these lines.
It is especially important to note that the whole argument on the right requires an enemy. Not just an opponent. Not someone you might have a beer with after the contest is over. Not, in fact, a fellow human being, but rather a cartoonish Villain, a thing so vile and horrible, and so dangerous, that the only proper approach to it is to eliminate it. To kill it. To save humanity from its clutches.
For a long time, Communism functioned as the primary Enemy for most of the right wing. When the Soviet Union inconveniently passed away and Eastern Europe was freed, suddenly new enemies were needed. It wasn't long before the fevered imaginations of the right were obsessed with black helicopters and the like. And once Bill Clinton was elected, of course, the U.S. Government itself became, in their narrative, the greatest enemy of the U.S.
Now Obama is President, and the paranoid language is again boiling over. You're all familiar with the ridiculous "birther" and "deather" fantasies, the assertion that Obama (and all of his supporters) are not "real Americans", the accusation that he wants to institute "death panels" to decide when we all must die. They are following the same pattern as they always have, though with this difference: each time around, the words get a little more heated, a little more over the top. Like junkies, the right wingers need a little more to get their juices flowing in each successive phase. So yes, it is getting worse.
The erection of an Enemy is very useful to the leaders of the right, because it provides a focal point on which to concentrate the hate that is their stock in trade. They want people to see themselves as victims, they want people to be angry, they want them to feel afraid. Then they want to take that anger and fear and use it to turn the people into a mob, to make them insane. They need to do this because they want the people to do insane things. They want to direct the negative energy they generated in the people against the leaders' real enemies, which is to say against the people themselves.
So, just to sum up, yes, the right wing is clearly more violent, and their rhetoric is more violent, than the so-called left, but to say so is almost tautological. That sort of violence is a defining feature of the right; so as long as we still have a right wing, we will have political violence. Moreover, it is essential, from the point of view of the leaders on the right, to keep them that way, in order to control them, and enslave them.
The question, in the end, is the one posed by Scrooge: are these things that must be, or only things that may be? I hope that the answer is the latter, but I fear that it may be the former.