Over the weekend, I noted Rand Paul's fear of the "Amero," the currency of the mythic North American Union to come (see this if you have no clue what I'm talking about). It's a bit of connective tissue that ties the "ideology" of the Tea Party movement directly to that of the paranoid and intensely xenophobic John Birch Society Right of the 1950s. We're talking 5th columns and fluoridated water -- assaults on our precious bodily fluids stuff.
Specifically, the North American Union arises from an idea articulated in an academic paper, later expanded into a book, by Robert Pastor (a perfectly ordinary professor at American University). Which may have been the end of it, except for the fact that it was published by the Council on Foreign Relations, which has always embodied the Evil Globalist Agenda according to the Birchers.
As Political Research Associates notes,
Much of the early Birch conspiracism reflects an ultraconservative business nationalist critique of business internationalists networked through groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR is viewed through a conspiracist lens as puppets of the Rockefeller family in a 1952 book by McCarthy fan, Emanuel M. Josephson, Rockefeller, 'Internationalist': The Man Who Misrules the World. In 1962 Dan Smoot's The Invisible Government added several other policy groups to the list of conspirators... In Smoot's concluding chapter, he wrote, "Somewhere at the top of the pyramid in the invisible government are a few sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: They want America to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship, under the control of the Kremlin."
Andrew Sullivan, pondering the Tea Party phenom, offers some fascinating passages from this 1955 essay by political scientist Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter looked at the "Pseudo-Conservative revolt" of that era (Theodore Adorno coined the phrase), and I highlighted a few bits for skimability:
...Although they believe themselves to be <span>conservative</span>s and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, [pseudo-conservatives] show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions. They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways — a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence.
Read the rest here [I know how annoying that is and apologize in advance -- AlterNet is a non-profit that feeds me and pays my rent, and this allows me to participate in the community without feeling guilty].