If a space alien unfamiliar with our politics and customs were to visit the United States and acquaint itself with our recent history, it would be astonished, no doubt, upon witnessing the seeming insanity that has gripped the opinion leaders of the more conservative wing of our political divide. It would surely pity and find ill-used a long-suffering American public forced to waste their time with increasingly insane drivel unbecoming the attention of a great nation.
That a popular new president just three months into his term, desperately trying (whether one agrees with his particular choice of solutions or not) to undo the damage unquestionably caused by his predecessors and a clearly failed ideology of deregulatory bellicose fervor--that such a president should be given a reasonable space of time in which to attempt to solve the problems set before him would seem to be common sense. Certainly, our hypothetical space alien would point to the years of forbearance given to the previous President after 9/11/01, and wonder that a similar unanimous embrace of bipartisan good feeling should not have emerged during an economic crisis of centennial proportions.
Instead, the conservative wing of our nation embarrasses humanity itself before our space alien by subjecting us to hysteria the likes of which have rarely been seen since 1950s McCarthyism.
Instead, we get popular cable news programs repeatedly violating Godwin's Law with reckless abandon; bold accusations of intent to remove American freedoms that no one in the current President's administration ever lent credence to--accusations so reckless that they have resulted in actual tragic loss of life; Kindergarten drawings in lieu of real policy proposals; representatives replaying 1950's era tactics, thereby demonstrating they do indeed have no sense of decency; billionaire-funded media-driven pushes to create super-paranoid astroturf protests with no discernible focus and a name so rife with sado-masochistic sexual innuendo that professional comedians would never have dreamed them possible; we even have the new conservative superstar declaring that foreign spies have taken over the electrical grid and planted themselves in unions and businesses ready to take over the government:
If you don’t think that foreign nationals that wish our country harm, that would like to see us collapse, are not here right now, the Tom Cruise of Russia, of China, of Iran, of any country, Chavez – if you don’t think that some of these Marxist revolutionary courses that are being taught out in California, the Marxist revolutionary influences in our own unions, in our own businesses, in our own uh, you know, protests out in the streets — if you think those are spontaneously happening by Americans, you’re an idiot.
Our space alien would surely shake his tentacles in utter disbelief. "What is going on with these strange humans?" it would ask. For we humans who spend too much time, too close to the phenomenon may not fully appreciate the how truly bizarre are our circumstances. In older days, the sort of histrionic political ne'er-do-wells who would publicly accuse a President such as Clinton of murder and Communist leanings were planted squarely on the sidelines of public discourse. Today, they make up the leadership of conservative "thought."
The answer is simple, for there is only one word that can explain this sudden collapse of intellectual fortitude. Panic. Sheer, unadulterated panic. The sort of panic that comes over a person when their oxygen supply is suddenly cut, or over a criminal when the cops come closing in.
It is a panic caused by an inability to fight by other means. Some might argue to our concerned space alien that these are people who have become accustomed to the trappings of power; that the sudden loss of the Executive and Legislature has reduced them to a state of temporary infantility from which they should recover in due time. And yet, our extrasolar friend might argue, such is politics: simple minority status cannot explain the depths of this self-imposed fall from grace and dignity.
And it would be right. The panic we are seeing from the GOP goes far beyond the shock of minority status. It is caused by a profound sense of powerlessness that comes not from a temporary electoral setback, but from a realization that previous methods of political survival have been rendered impossible.
I argued long before the election that an Obama victory would provoke a sea change in American politics. Put simply, the GOP's battle for the entire past century has been to roll back the New Deal of FDR. They were largely unsuccessful until the aftermath of the Civil Rights era, when the anger of poor and middle-class whites against upper-class whites was successfully transferred to minorities who were supposedly taking their tax dollars, and libertine women supposedly upending God's social order. Every argument made by the right wing--from welfare to taxes to foreign policy and everything in between--was a coded appeal to punish minorities, libertine women, scary foreigners and the supposed social engineering experiments of white liberals. But especially minorities. Remember this quote from Lee Atwater, Karl Rove's mentor:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "N----r, n----r, n----r." By 1968 you can't say "n----r"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
The entire principle of Republican politics was predicated on the notion that an African-American man named Barack Hussein Obama could barely get a fair shake at catching a cab or getting an apartment, much less winning the presidency and a 60% approval rating. To some, the notion remains so impossible that it must have been the work of a massive shadow conspiracy.
The ascendancy of Barack Hussein Obama (and, to a lesser degree, Hillary Clinton) to the highest stations of political power in America represents, in a final sense, the rejection of that brand of politics by a majority of Americans. Ignore the specific arguments and concerns of 2008 and examine the broad spectrum: it means that a majority of Americans have moved past all that. That conservatives will have to establish an entirely new paradigm to attempt to win elections.
In this context, the fact that conservatives find themselves unable to be taken seriously when complaining about deficit spending; that they have shown themselves completely incompetent in the realm of warfare and foreign policy; that an entire American city drowned helplessly on their watch; that their economic philosophy was responsible for the collapse of the world economy and provides no answers in the face of the current crisis; all this is mere icing on the cake. National political parties can pivot from such things easily enough by taking advantage of circumstance and their opponents' mistakes.
On a fundamental level, conservatives have nothing to say because they don't know what to say. Even if they dared attempt to use the same political strategies as before in spite of their obvious failure, they would be immediately called out as the race-baiting garbage they have always been, due to sensitivity about Obama's own race. They're completely flummoxed. It takes time to develop entirely new paradigms, and they don't have them right now.
So instead, our space alien friend is subjected to the equivalent of the 6-year-old protesting his early bedtime, then fantasizing powerlessly about his parents as evil monsters a la Calvin and Hobbes' Spaceman Spiff. Glenn Beck's wild fantasies of Communist insurrectionist threat are equivalent to those of the high school nerd who, unable or unwilling to deal with the world as it actually presents itself, retreats into fantasy games, swinging ethereal swords at the faceless orcs who have come to take the place of his ever-present bullies and tormentors in his own imagination. Such lashing out is, in its essence, the commonplace reaction of desperate individuals attempting boldly to escape a reality which they intellectually refuse to acknowledge.
When young, powerless or physically weak, such reactions are understandable--even worth encouraging when no other way to escape temporary torment may present itself.
When taken on by a significant, recently powerful and well-armed minority of the public in response to a newly permanent and ever-present reality, such nationally acquired delusions, fueled by multiple well-funded media organs, can be incredibly dangerous. A clearly unhinged individual like Glenn Beck only gains popularity by virtue of an overwhelming sense of desperation necessitating massive self-delusion.
As this latest round of infantilized conservative "protest" begins, it worth bearing in mind the collective self-deluded desperation felt by these people as an entire worldview has come crashing down around their feet.
That sense of collective panic, I believe, is something even a space alien could understand.