Another Crack at the Wingnut Code

Chris Lowe takes issue with Adele Stan's comment [below]:

Part of what has happened in the past 15 years is a crystallization and wide spread of ideas that say that virtually all government is illegitimate. These ideas are not the conspiracist ideas of the fringe Right based on bizarre constitutional theories. They are the everyday language of organized ideological conservative politics, both inside the Republican Party and outside of it. A particular piece that has become more prominent even more recently is the idea, imported from "Austrian school" political economists (Ludwig von Mises, Hayek & followers) though independent of their more specific economic theories, that all government is "collectivist," which is the basis of the claims that liberalism is socialism, that social democracy and democratic socialism are communism and so on, that are so rife.

It is not Timothy McVeigh's t-shirt ("The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.") that matters here. It is the basic idea that human beings are social beings who legitimately work together to advance mutual interests and use governments of various sorts as one means to do that. That's what's under attack. Fortunately, it also is a common sense idea, and provided we see the challenge and threat for what it is, it is a fight we can win.

But we are not going to win it if we look down on a large segment of the people just because we disagree with their ideas. And we are not going to win if we engage on our side in what Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics" just because there are ideologues on the other side engaging in that style to whip people up. See the Tea Party movement solely or mainly through the lens of the Patriot and militia movements is also paranoid style politics. We need to track and follow those movements, because they do exist, but we need to be clear about what exactly they are, and their limits.

Read Chris's full comment, posted to Portside (click here and scroll down). ey