One of the compensations of spending the past seven years covering the Bachmann beat is the "payoff you get in unintentional humor."
Frank Rich is a big-time newspaper columnist that I actually admire, but this week he put a big smile on my face without even meaning to. It seems that Rich has suddenly discovered that the Tea Party movement is filled with "nuts." I mean "real-live, the end of the world is near, it's all a conspiracy, the Dems are conspiring to end freedom in America" nuts.
The reason that's funny is that the tone of the article indicates that Frank Rich thinks that's news--a new development on the right. I know something about the right because I've been watching Bachmann for many years. So I know it's not news that so many of the people representing grass-roots conservative activism have nutty beliefs about the world and the US government.
But Frank Rich, veteran observer of US political life, did not know that. And that, to me, is funny. (CONTINUED)
Rich is writing specifically about the "Tea Party" movement--and that 'political brand' is comparatively new, I'll concede that.
But what about the loony ideas that Rich and other journalists object to in the tea party movement? They're not new at all. The most irrational ideas treasured by the loony right are at least sixty years old ("the federal government has already been penetrated by a secret socialist conspiracy," "the ultimate goal of the liberals and political insiders is ending American liberty," etc.)
The "birther" thing is crackpot and that's new--but that's Obama specific, and the loony right that Rich identifies is not Obama specific. They hate him, but they hate or despise practically every American who doesn't sign on to their conspiratorial world view.
No, these people and their crazy, self-imposed, self-created hierarchy of reality are not a new development in US politics. They were there, in place--decades before anyone was talking about tea parties and tea bagging.
But Rich and a number of other columnists see this as some kind of "stunning" new development. Why? Haven't they ever heard of Rush Limbaugh? James Dobson? Don't they know that for a generation millions of conservative Americans were trained to disregard recognized expertise, the findings of academia and mainstream professional political reporting?
How can anyone paying any kind of attention be surprised that this is the result? A tiny example: during the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh regularly indicated to his vast national audience that the Clintons were implicated in the murder of Vince Foster. It doesn't matter that you and I and Frank Rich and the people who investigated the death dismiss that as crackpot nonsense--if Limbaugh claimed it was true, millions of Americans believed it was true and conducted their politics on the basis of that claim.
Because American conservatism proceeds from the doings of liars and crackpots. The rank and file is driven by a conservative movement that can replace truths from authoritative sources (even scientific truths!) with crackpot lies designed to galvanize "the base."
The loonies at the tea party convention aren't an "outbreak"--they're "the harvest!" It stuns me that so many of the liberal pundits and observers don't understand this. This isn't some "temporary phenomenon" that arises every once in a while in US politics (like the Know Nothings or the 1920s Klan.) This an massive engineered voting demographic that is designed to go to demagogues for its basic operating information. Not schools, not experts, not scientists, certainly not professional editors and reporters trying to observe traditional standards for reporting.
Michele Bachmann. There. I put her in this diary. She's also mentioned in Rich's article, just a briefly, as a cast member in this nuthouse "he's just discovered." What I realize, that you don't realize, is that Bachmann has always represented these loony views that Rich criticizes (about one world government conspiracies already inside the federal government.) Long before there was this "tea party" brand, Michele had this loopy view of reality based on John Birch Society-type conspiracy theories. If you want to read documentation for this, you'll have to buy the comic book I publish or look it up in my past diaries here.
In the meantime, here's a link to a review of a book that I recommend to people when they ask me "what the hell I am talking about." It's a flawed book, it doesn't mention Bachmann or the tea party--but they are just "the foam," this book is about "the wave":
http://www.prospect.org/...
This week (now that the liberal trad media has suddenly "discovered" that so many of the "grass roots" angry conservatives are nuts), they are writing articles about how this is a temporary thing the right is going through. Some of them compare it to the extremists who showed up at Goldwater GOP events in 1964; they "faded away" after Goldwater lost. That's right.
And here's something else that's right: the Goldwater extremist backers who faded away were John Birch Society members, and just this month the prestigious Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was sponsored by: the John Birch Society. So when someone tells you that these conspiracy nuts are just going "fade away"--give that person a kick in the ass for me, will you? They're more powerful than ever in American history, they're capturing the GOP, the GOP leadership and conservative leadership accepts them, and they will have a say in who goes to Congress this fall.
The next big "revelation" in the political awakening of Frank Rich and liberal commentators will come when they realize that this "loony American right" that they've just realized is still a force--was actually formed, engineered, and is being directed by particular individuals and organizations on the right. Again: I knew that years ago, because I've been writing about Bachmann. But when Frank Rich finally figures that out, decades after the fact, the little picture that appears with his op-ed column will show his hair standing on end.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
UPDATE: I'm getting comments like this from some people:
Sorry, but I think you missed Rich's point (4+ / 0-)
I don't think Rich sounds as if he's just discovering the "nutty right" at all. In fact, he specifically mentions the parallels between the Oklahoma bombings and recent IRS plane attack.
I think his point was that there's never been such public acceptance or embrace of the "nutty right" from mainstream political figures before and it's a dangerous trend.
The commenter and other commenters are correct in identifying Rich's point as "there's never been such public acceptance or embrace of the "nutty right" from mainstream political figures before and it's a dangerous trend."
But Rich is surprised that the nutty right is so powerful. If he listened to conservative talk radio at any time over the past three decades, he would not be surprised by this at all. That is my point. It is also my point that liberals, progressives and journalists who express surprise and fear about the fact that kooks have "suddenly" come to prominence in the GOP--*should have been* listening to the anti-rationalist propaganda that has been spewed out daily at millions of Americans. To the extent I am 'sneering' at Rich and other liberal commentators, it's not because they don't know the history of the loony right (they do)--it's that they don't know how pervasive the thinking of the loony right has been on the American right over the last thirty years. If you don't know that, you don't know American politics at the turn of the century.