Yesterday and Tuesday, we noted that the left, locally and nationally, is engaging in class-action slander, based around getting people to believe that:
Conservative dissent equals murder.
It’s not an isolated trend.
It’s not new.
And it’s not an accident.
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“The dangerous right” is a well-worn trope in American political/media history. It is also – to invoke Orwell’s aphorism about dictators needing enemies – entirely predictable.
Three weeks ago Philip Jenkins wrote an excellent history about the “Dangerous Right” media meme in American Conservative. It’s an oldie, all right (emphasis added):
From 1938 through 1941, the media regularly presented stories suggesting that the U.S. was about to be overwhelmed by ultra-Right fifth columnists, millions strong, intimately allied with the Axis powers. (Actual numbers of serious militants were in the low thousands at most.) Reportedly, the militant Right was armed to the teeth and plotting countless domestic terror attacks—bombings in New York and Washington, assassinations and pogroms, the wrecking of trains and munitions plants. Plotters were rumored to have high-placed allies in the military, raising the specter of a putsch. The ensuing panic was orchestrated by newspapers and radio and reinforced by films, newsreels, and comic books. Historians characterize these years as the Brown Scare.
In other words, standing in the way of FDR, the New Deal and the dawn of enlightened “liberalism” and Hope and Change itself was a shadowy, secret army – why, one might almost call it a “vast, right-wing conspiracy”!
And when liberals come to office with big, sweeping, “transformative” plans? Well, the “enemy among us” needs to be trotted out as well:
After JFK’s election in 1960, the devoutly anti-Communist Minutemen took first place in liberals’ demonology. As in the 1930s, the far Right was supposed to be closely tied to out-of-control military officers. Remember fictional treatments of the time like “Dr. Strangelove” and “Seven Days in May”? Once more, too, the supposed threat from far-Right extremism surfaced in mainstream politics, especially during the 1964 elections…As in the 1930s, the extremists existed, and some hotheads contemplated violence. But once again, a yawning gulf separated the reality of the threat from the public perception.
In our lifetimes – so far – the worst fell during the Clinton years:
Between 1995 and 2001, America suffered the Great Militia Panic, when exposés of ultra-Right violence became a media staple. For liberal press outlets, America was facing a clear and present danger from the militias, from Nazis and skinheads, and even from dissident elements within U.S. Special Forces. Liberals accused the anti-Clinton Right of providing extremists with ideological aid and comfort. An impressive outpouring of books—peaking in 1996—warned of an imminent terrorist disaster. Typical titles raised the shadow of America’s Militia Threat, Terrorists Among Us, or The Birth of Paramilitary Terrorism in the Heartland. One book warned of the Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is Only the Beginning.
I always found it ironic how lefties accused conservatives of “wetting their pants in terror” about islamic terrorism after 9/11, after living through the waves of “mommy, there’s a militiaman under my bed!” that swept the nation during the Clinton years
The news media was open to the most improbable charges of right-wing atrocities. In 1996, television news shows discovered a (wholly spurious) wave of arson attacks in which white extremists were allegedly wiping out the nation’s black churches.
As recently as a decade ago, “terrorism” in the American public consciousness meant, almost entirely, domestic right-wing activism…by far the worst consequence of the Militia Panic was the massive underplaying of Islamic terrorism in U.S. public discourse and the disproportionate focus on the domestic far Right. Liberal columnists scoffed knowingly at terrorism experts who warned about foreign militants like al-Qaeda, when every informed observer knew that the real menace was internal.
I remember lefty pundits on about 9/13 furrowing their brows and warning us that right-wing domestic terror was still the “real danger”, as the Twin Towers still burned. They were – it is hard to remember – that deluded.
By the way – does any of this sound familiar (emphasis again added)? Elements of this phenomenon anticpate blogging itself by about sixty years:
If the more bizarre accusations sound like the common currency of the show trials in Stalin’s Russia in these very years, that is no coincidence. The main exposés of fascist conspiracy emanated from Communist Party journalists like Albert Kahn and John Spivak. (Spivak himself was an operative for the Soviet NKVD.) Charges circulated through Kahn’s newssheet The Hour before being picked up in the liberal press. The Red agenda was straightforward in that the Brown Scare allowed the Left to discredit any opponent of radical New Deal policies. Scratch the surface of any enemy of the Left, they claimed, and you would find a fascist spy, a lyncher, a storm trooper.
Or a member of a “vast, right-wing” and now “eliminationist” “conspiracy”.
The conclusion is near the beginning, and it is damning (emphasis added):
Based on the record of past Democratic administrations, in the near future terrorism will almost certainly be coming home. This does not necessarily mean more attacks on American soil. Rather, public perceptions of terrorism will shift away from external enemies like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah and focus on domestic movements on the Right. We will hear a great deal about threats from racist groups and right-wing paramilitaries, and such a perceived wave of terrorism will have real and pernicious effects on mainstream politics. If history is any guide, the more loudly an administration denounces enemies on the far Right, the easier it is to stigmatize its respectable and nonviolent critics.
Like me.
Like Representative Bachmann.
Like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Bernie Goldberg.
Like you, you bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freak, you.
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When I’d heard that the DNC had hired linguist George Lakoff, I openly worried that the left was embarking on a campaign of violence – violence against the language. It would be a campaign to control how the language itself imparts perceptions about politics. It’s a battle the Democrats have been winning for decades, if only because they’re the only ones that show up.
The parallels with Orwell’s 1984, where language was being systematically engineered to reflect first political orthodoxy and, eventually, nothing at all, are impossible to miss.
In Mike Judge’s overlooked classic movie Idiocracy, society falls because idiots outbreed smart people. Despots and demigogues have long known that the best way to take over a society is to win over the thugs and the dolts; the pen is, at least in the short term, not mightier than the sword or, in this case, the truncheon. Noriega had his Dignity Battalions; Mugabe, the Gukurahundi; Hitler and Mao and Stalin, the Sturmabteilung and Hitlerjugend, the Red Guards, the Komsomol, the legions of dedicated true believers who didn’t have to think, just do; to smear the Jew, the Bourgeois, the Wreckers today, and to beat, imprison and kill them tomorrow. For society’s own good.
And the Big Left today has, on a rhetorical plane, the same basic thing; the legions of the ingenuous, the dedicated but not-excessively-bright, the people who are willing to suspend the rules of civility and decency in service of…
…what? The meme that “Some of your fellow citizens’ beliefs will lead to mass murder!”?
I’d like to think that continuing to take the high road is the right response to this class-action slander. I’m less confident in this all the time. Indeed, as I noted yesterday, DHS Secretary Napolitano has tipped the left’s hand.
Let’s try to roll it all together tomorrow.
