Let me begin by stating that I do not mean to be alarmist, I do not want to make people scared unnecessarily and I will not deny people the pleasures of Schadenfreude at the misery that the Republicans have inflicted upon themselves.
Amidst all the humour at Rove’s discomfort at the victory of the tea partiers and De Mint’s declaration of civil war in the Republican Party, I felt a moment of intense worry and wrote this is the diary by Oil Guy (http://www.dailykos.com/...):
We need to defeat these right-wing whackos at the ballot box in November; even more importantly, we need to fight them back to the margins of the hard-right where they belong.
The republican mainstream may think that they can tame them and win votes in the future in that they hope they will be able to control them and view this as a temporary difficulty.
We need to expose them for what they are; they are extreme right-wing (I would argue protofascists) and extremely dangerous. They crawl out of their caves and we need to beat them back into them or they will have the last laugh and this will only mean short-term electoral gains on our part. If these people can seize control of the republican party and sell themselves as part of the mainstream all of america (and the rest of the world) will suffer.
I do not mean to cut short the celebrations. They are needed as we needed to celebrate and let go of some of our tensions about the up-coming elections in November. My worry is that we will only be concentrating on possibilities of short-term electoral victories and not keep our eyes on the longer term danger.
In a sermon in 1938, Professor Halford E. Luccock of Yale Divinity School said something that has been attributed to both Huey Long and Sinclair Lewis (http://shii.org/...):
When and if Fascism comes to America, it will not be labelled "made in Germany"; it will not be marked by a Swastika; it will not even be called Fascism; it will, of course, be called Americanism.
The victories of tea party candidates against mainstream candidates in the Republican Party indicate that the balance of power in the former coalition developed by Reagan has shifted. While previously, the alliance between the libertarians, religious right and corporatist republicans was balanced, with the religious right held in check; the ascendancy of the religious right married to what was traditionally held as the extreme right in the US has enabled the rise of what for all appearances is a proto-fascist movement in the heart of a mainstream political party. We need to ensure that this proto-fascist movement does not develop into a full blown fascist movement in the heart of a mainstream political party with access to its resources and power.
While the extreme hard right in the US has been for the most part kept to the fringes of political life in the US, it is now seen as a legitimate faction in a mainstream political party. These people have always existed in the political discourse, but for the most part they have been viewed as extremist outsiders in the form of the KKK, the survivalist movement, neo-nazi and white-supremacist organisations. People that for the most part have been disdained by the vast majority now have a political legitimacy; even more so, there have media assistance that provides positive coverage to their actions and opinions.
Certainly, mainstream republicans and there are a few left in the party (an indication of how far to the right the Republican Party has shifted is that someone as right-wing as Karl Rove tries to pass himself off as mainstream) will attempt to deal with this problem. They will try containing the movement and separating themselves from these people, they will try co-opting them in the hopes of controlling them, they may even go as far as ousting them from the party (while recruiting the right of the democratic party) portraying themselves as the centre in the battle between the extreme right and the extreme left (the democratic party). Their tactics will depend on how rapidly the strength of this faction rises. Ultimately, the mainstream of the Republican Party will find ways of working with them in some form or another as they are comfortable with whatever political system they have as long as the economic system is secure. It is up to us (the centre, the liberals, the progressives and the left) to defeat this new right-wing threat to democracy in the US.
What I see is that we are in a struggle for the soul and the future of the United States. While we must work on fighting these people at the ballot boxes, it is essential that we do not lose sight of the bigger picture. We must defeat these people ideologically; we must defeat the dangerous rise of racist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and homophobic ideology. This has to be done on many levels.
Some of the support for this group exists due to the economic crisis and the feeling that government has abandoned people and cannot be trusted. In Washington DC and in the various states, we need to make sure that our democratic party representatives fight to cover and protect those affected by the economic crisis to demonstrate how government can actually help and not only serve the interests of the wealthy. On the local and grass-roots levels we need to strengthen organisations fighting against the ideologies of this group. We need to work together to combat racism, xenophobia, homophobia and sexism. We need to unite cross-class and cross-perspective to defeat them.
Our enemies, the enemies of all civilisation, are once again gathering strength and we need to be ready to beat them back once again. This is not the first time that this has happened, it will not be the last time; but the moment that we become complacent, the moment that we are not there to fight these people is the opening that will allow them to become entrenched in the mainstream of political discourse. We need to push them back to the fringes where they belong.
NB: h/t to demi moaned: A link to Digby's blog discussing Ed Kilgore's take on the rise of an extreme right-wing movement within the Republican party: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/...