But I think in some form or other this phenomenon has been around for longer than one might think. It's essentially the refinement of the old Henry and Becket faceoff.
There a two main things that I find a bit frightening about that article
1. That white supremacist blogs actually go to all this trouble to try to legitimize their writing. It shows they are not fooling around with this stuff - they have a target audience, a plan on how to appeal to that audience, and they execute that plan very well.
Demagoguery and "whipping-up" rhetoric have been around forever. What's changed is that there is a better understanding of the psychology of communication, and that is being exploited by the demagogues to further their agenda while maintaining distance from it.
The really disturbing thing is that this is all heavily based in the psychology of marketing. The terrorists have learned how to advertise effectively, and make their calls to action indirect and implied, and thus more effective (along with being deniable).
If you look at the history of advertising, there has been a huge shift in how the communication works, how it's targeted, and how it's structured. The primary emphasis is on association, implication, and emotion rather than factual details. This has become especially true in the age of "viral marketing", where a small amount of effort on the part of the marketer to create "memes" shifts much of the effort off of the marketers themselves, and onto the targets of their marketing, who can be expected to self-market by sharing the memes. The use of humour in viral marketing is one of the most effective techniques for prompting a viral propagation of the advertisement.
This has been picked up on by the Right and Far Right, who have been increasingly effective at implementing this sort of "viral marketing" of their worldview and calls to action.
2. There are a fair percentage of people out there who are stupid enough to fall for their rhetoric. We even have a few of theme right here in this forum.
The Right has always been effective at marketing, because they understand it better than the Left, and their worldview is far more easily adapted to marketing than the Left's worldview.
They key components of the Right's messaging:
1) Abdication of responsibility for one's person circumstances. Despite paying lip service to "personal responsibility", the fundamental goal of the Right is to blame someone or something else for one's own failures and inabiliy to improve one's personal and/or financial status.
2) Scapegoating for social and economic problems. After abdicating responsibility, blame must be cast on another entity. Immigrants, certain ethnic groups (Jews and black people most commonly), homosexuals and transexuals, Muslims, and so on. There must be a convenient marginalized group to make the target of fear and focus of hatred to distract from the true nature and complexity of the problems.
3) Simple answers to complex questions. Humans do not like complexity, complexity is hard and takes considerable effort to understand. People prefer simple answers to the problems of social upheaval, economic instability, and their own sub-optimal life circumstances. Even better if these answers absolve the mainstream of responsibility for their circumstances, and put the blame on someone or something else, as noted in 1 and 2. The ultimate answer is always, "put your trust and support in a strong-man leader, and your problems will be fixed for you".
That is a very simple and easy message to market: It's not your fault, it's this other groups fault, vote for me and I'll punish them and reward you.
The message of the Progressive Left is considerably more complex, depends heavily on people being intelligent and introspective enough to take true responsibility for their circumstances, and understanding the complicated social forces that can stymie personal efforts to improve one's circumstances. It's very difficult to distill into quick-and-dirty sound bites and slogans; and therefore harder to market as effectively as the reactionary worldview.
This is just the Right hoisting the Left up by one of their highest and proudest petards... "tolerance."
That is because the Left fetishizes the concept of "tolerance" the same way that centrists and libertarians fetishize the concepts of "free speech" and "liberty" without truly understanding the nature and limitations of those concepts. I've posted this link a number of times, but it continues to be relevant and IMO very important to understand:
Tolerance is not a moral precept[/quote]. It's a peace treaty, not a suicide pact, and once the treaty has been broken by one side ,the other side is no longer obligated to abide by it. "Tolerance of the intolerant" is not a valid expression of the principle, and it is in fact diametrically opposed to the concept of tolerance, because the result is a lessening, not a growth, of tolerance.
