The Paranoid Right & Attacks on Moveon.org

[applegrove]

The Paranoid Right & Attacks on Moveon.org
by Cliff Schecter
Huffington Post
Oct 31, 2006

"In his always insightful New York Times column, Paul Krugman in recent weeks was even better than usual. Krugman, when looking at the paranoid, conspiracy-laden, resentful, self-hating troglodytes that form the foundation of the modern GOP, referenced arguably the most astute political observer of the past half century, historian Richard Hofstadter.


Hofstadter wrote a number of classics you probably read in high school or college, from The Age of Reform to The American Political Tradition. But it was in his work The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, where he looked at the "angry minds" that animated both the McCarthy uprising and the Goldwater movement (Hofstadter wrote these essays in the 1950s and 1960s) and made some of his most prescient observations.

It's easy to see him predicting, in the "pseudo-conservative revolt" the paranoid politics employed by the GOP that has delivered our country to Bob-Corker-style racists, little spoiled brats named George with family lineages from suburban California and Greenwich, Connecticut, who like to play cowboy dress-up (Bush and Allen, respectively) and supposed anti-government Westerners like Senator Jon Kyl, who actually favors the government becoming so authoritarian as to be a dictatorship mining your health records and dating habits--when he is not musing openly about preemptively bombing Iran.

Don't get me wrong, this trend was already on the rise when Hofstadter wrote about it, utilized by the George Wallaces, Irving Kristols, Jerry Falwells and Richard Nixons, but as they have grown more powerful and have become a cancer on our body politic, it is more important then ever to expose these miscreants for what they are and fight back when they use the anti-Democratic tactics that are part and parcel to their entire atavistic movement.

...............SNIP"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cliff-schecter/the-paranoid-right-and-at_b_32875.html