The Dangerous Feedback Loop

As I stated elsewhere, I was pretty much done with the US version of conservatism. It seems to be getting worse and I don't want this rot reappearing up here (I'm looking at you, 1980's WCC Party). A couple of links before I begin my larger rant, just for background. Once again, fair warning: these are links to American liberals.

An American Nazi And The Rhetoric That Welcomed Him

I'd like to tell you a story about that — about how a handful of Google searches and something like "Citizen Journalism" pointed up the tacit complicity of the soi-disant liberal media in the creation of and reporting on an American Nazi, and how their toleration, inattention or cowardice creates a national discourse that increasingly imports militant fringe rhetoric that demonizes millions of Americans.

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism

In terms of his breadth of reach as a political propagandist, he has no real parallel in American history. The closest might be the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, known to his radio audience of the 1920s and ‘30s as "Father Coughlin." Coughlin started out as an anti-communist firebrand, and by 1930, his weekly broadcasts reached an audience estimated at 45 million. (Limbaugh claims a weekly audience of 20 million.) He was a major supporter of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, but turned on FDR shortly afterward and became a severe critic of the administration through most of its tenure.

I link to these articles for a number of reasons, the first being that you cannot live in an echo chamber. There is nothing wrong with vehemently disagreeing with an opinion (in these cases, I do not disagree with either link or the content therein) but there is something inherently wrong with dismissing counterarguments out of hand.

The two links above address the problem of normalizing the fringe. Both blogs do go deeper into it, but normalizing the fringe is a bad thing regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum. Recently, the American right (and to a lesser extent the Canadian right) has been doing just that.

HotAir, a blog I occasionally post comments on, there is some strangeness going on involving the shooting at the Holocaust Memorial. Ed Morrissey, (aka Captain Ed, aka the guy who did Canada an invaluable service by breaking the publication ban during the Sponsorship Inquiry), uses some pretzel logic attempting to show how silly the DHS report actually was. Why? Well, let's let Ed explain:

To that, I’d respond that our criticism was that the DHS report didn’t focus on known, specific threats, instead making generalized threats about abortion opponents and other vague and broad generalizations about conservative issues.

We'll just leave that out there for you to savour that pretzel.

At any rate, to Ed's credit, he tacitly acknowledges that von Brunn is actually a right wing extremist. The comments section doesn't. And that's part of the problem of normalizing the fringe. The logic goes, and I swear I'm not making this up, because Nazism is actually National Socialism, and socialism is a left wing political idea, that Nazis are socialists and therefore left wing. Oh, transitive property, how grand are you? We don't need to spend time looking at what the Nazis did or said, we just need a simplistic way of disassociating that from the right.

Now, this concept has been popularized by Jonah Goldberg's book 'Liberal Fascism' which is, from all accounts from serious scholars, an utter joke. Oddly, because of the closed system that far too many conservatives inhabit, it's a scholarly work for the right. The lie perpetuates and grows until it gets to the point where you can take an avowed Neo-Nazi and claim, with a straight face, he is a liberal. One wonders if the lack of gay marriage in the States is what put him over the edge...

The right isn't in disarray down south, it has gone completely insane. Refusal to learn new concepts and jettison the tired ones whilst ignoring core principles will spell the end. The rebuilding process will be painful, simply because the base is what has to go.