In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition

[Walter Ego]

From an op-ed in The Washington Post, Sunday, August 16, 2009, By Rick Perlstein, author of Nixionland.

[T]he birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny.

Complete article here.

 

[dudalb]

I notice that Perlstein carefully avoids mentioning there are plenty of kooks on the political Left as well.
I agree with what he says about the right wing loons, but his obvious bias sort of wrecks his point.

 

[Walter Ego]

I notice that Perlstein carefully avoids mentioning there are plenty of kooks on the political Left as well.
I agree with what he says about the right wing loons, but his obvious bias sort of wrecks his point.

Perlstein is a leftist, but if he focuses on right-wing kooks (and the piece is about the hysteria over Obama's heath care reform, remember), it's because the right wingers are the one acting kooky this political season.

Interestingly, Perlstein, in his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, was thought by some liberals to be too sympathetic to the conservative movement.

 

[Eyeron]

In America people love to generalize and use collective judgments based on the tiniest of associations.

 

[Cl1mh4224rd]

In America people love to generalize and use collective judgments based on the tiniest of associations.

I'm sure you'll find that this is attributable to all humanity. Oddly, so is the need to project such negative attributes onto "others".