{"id":60112,"date":"2016-08-30T11:30:21","date_gmt":"2016-08-30T16:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=60112"},"modified":"2016-08-29T19:17:45","modified_gmt":"2016-08-30T00:17:45","slug":"everything-two-four-six-12-and-22-years-old-is-new-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=60112","title":{"rendered":"Everything Two, Four, Six, 12 And 22 Years Old Is New Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What does the &#8220;Alt-Right&#8221; have in common with 2014&#8217;s Koch Brothers, 2012&#8217;s &#8220;ALEC&#8221;, 2010&#8217;s &#8220;Tea Party&#8221;,\u00a0\u00a02004&#8217;s &#8220;neocons&#8221;, and 1994&#8217;s &#8220;Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Everything!<\/p>\n<p>One of the great staples of politics &#8211; in this case, the left, although the right does it too (although with less cynical panache or institutional momentum) &#8211; is &#8220;finding a boogeyman to wave around to scare the crap out of your base&#8221;, ideally motivating them to come to the polls.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In 1996, it was Hillary&#8217;s &#8220;vast right-wing conspiracy&#8221; &#8211; the shadowy, all-powerful and, as it happens, fictitious conglomeration of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and, er, others, I guess &#8211; whom the left trumpeted as the real machers behind the scenes, operating against the plucky underdogs of the left (like George Soros and Paul Allen).<\/li>\n<li>In 2004, it was the &#8220;Neocons&#8221; &#8211; a shadowy, all-powerful, and vaguely Jew-y band of conspirators who wanted to control All the Oil and kill All the Muslims for Israel, or something, arrayed against the plucky, grass-roots left ((like George Soros and Paul Allen).<\/li>\n<li>In 2010, it was the &#8220;Tea Party&#8221; &#8211; a fairly spontaneous outpouring of libertarian populism which threatened the plucky, organic left ((like Journo-List, George Soros and Paul Allen).<\/li>\n<li>In 2012, it was ALEC &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=26866\">a run-of-the-mill policy think tank much like many others on all sides of the political aisle<\/a> that the left&#8217;s PR machine, plucky grass-rooters that they were (like George Soros and Paul Allen and Michael Bloomberg), tried to paint as a shadowy, sinister conspiracy that drove public policy via unprecedented means like, well, circulating model bills and stuff.<\/li>\n<li>In 2014 it was the &#8220;Koch Brothers&#8221;, a couple of libertarian billionaires with a history of donating to libertarian causes on <em>both\u00a0<\/em>sides of the political aisle\u00a0who, <a href=\"http:\/\/illinoisreview.typepad.com\/illinoisreview\/2014\/02\/koch-brothers-not-even-in-top-50-political-donors-in-america.html\">though they aren&#8217;t even among the top fifty individual political donors<\/a>, were portrayed by the left&#8217;s plucky, grass-roots PR machine (funded by George Soros and Paul Allen) as a shadowy, vaguely Jew-y conspiracy to buy the government.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So\u00a0<em>of course\u00a0<\/em>the &#8220;Alt Right&#8221; &#8211; a tiny, politically inconsequential group of marginal people with marginal-radical views on some hot-topic issues &#8211; is suddenly in the news.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, in every case, Berg&#8217;s Seventh Law applies; for every one of these purported right wing big-money &#8220;conspiracy&#8221;, there was a real-world left-wing counterpart doing exactly what the left accused the right of doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What does the &#8220;Alt-Right&#8221; have in common with 2014&#8217;s Koch Brothers, 2012&#8217;s &#8220;ALEC&#8221;, 2010&#8217;s &#8220;Tea Party&#8221;,\u00a0\u00a02004&#8217;s &#8220;neocons&#8221;, and 1994&#8217;s &#8220;Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?&#8221; Everything! One of the great staples of politics &#8211; in this case, the left, although the right does it too (although with less cynical panache or institutional momentum) &#8211; is &#8220;finding a boogeyman [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[321,323],"tags":[243],"class_list":["post-60112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-left","category-big-leftymoney","tag-bergs-7th-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60113,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60112\/revisions\/60113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}