Gary Wills on the current state of Republican extremism

The New York Review of Books PUT up a podcast by Garry Wills on their Web site dated 09/10/09 talking about his article for the magazine, Conservatives: The Tanenhaus Taxonomy for the 09/24/09 issue, on the state of American conservatism, as of a bit over a year ago.

The interviewer, Hugh Akin, asks him at about 7:50 in the podcast:

Akin: And today we have, in some sense, a revival of these extreme positions. We have the Birthers, the death panelists, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh. Do you see in some sense that all of these things are continuing, not so much a death of conservatism as a splintering into these various fringes?

Wills: This is a new phenomenon, the people who say the country has been stolen from them. And there's deep racism and deep xenophobia involved in this. As somebody said, the extremist now looks around and sees a black man in the White House, thinks he's a Muslim. Sees a woman in the Secretary of State position. Sees Ramadan dinner in the White House. So there's now an attempt to deligitimize the entire Democratic Party, saying that Obama is not even a citizen, that the Party is fascist, that it's trying to stage a coup and kill Republicans. You know, this makes the John Birchers look moderate.

This is a really deep, emotional, almost pathological condition. And I'm not sure how extensive it is because a lot of Republicans, I feel, don't have those attitudes. But they've shrunk to such an extent that they're afraid of losing anybody. And they're trying to keep the fringe aboard by humoring them so far as they can.

I think this is a pretty typical liberal reaction to the Tea Party antics we've been seeing during the last couple of years. But the Democrats and progressives have to get beyond that. Because actually there are several things that are problematic about this approach.

One is that something just as fanatical happened early on in the Clinton administration and continued throughout it. The one time I heard the late great Molly Ivins speak live was during the Clinton administration. She said someone had asked her whether she had seen this kind of intense hatred toward a President before. And she told them, yes, back when John Kennedy was President.

This does not mean that it's somehow okay to be fanatical and plunge your head into conspiracy theories and blatantly lie about public policy issues and individual politicians. It also does not mean that racism isn't a part of the current Republican fanaticism. It's not that there's no racism involved now. It's that there was intense racism involved in the anti-Clinton hysteria, too. Remember how he was called "the first black President" because of his friendly position on civil-rights-related issues? Although that was meant as a compliment by his fans, it was a source of horror and hatred to his fanatical opponents.

And certainly the intense hatred of rightwingers for President Kennedy was based on his sympathetic attitude toward racial integration. The fanatics in those days were more likely to be Southern Democrats than Republicans, though. But by no means all of them. The Goldwater Republicans of that day hated Kennedy as much as Southern segregationists did.

So when Wills says, "This is a new phenomenon, the people who say the country has been stolen from them," he's basically blotting out the way we say the Republicans Party act in the opposition in the 1990s. And they were every bit as fanatical against the Democrats and the antiwar movement in the 2000s. Their alleged respect for the Office of the President has dropped right off the cliff. But the country and the Constitution and democratic government and the law are not the authorities which our Republican authoritarians honor. Their authority is the Republican Party.

Gene Lyons is more on track in asking, Is the GOP a cult? Salon 09/10/09. The shouting mobs at the town halls may have been mostly rank-and-file Republicans. But their Party has been ginning up the fury via its Mighty Wurlitzer of Republican operatives and Party-affiliated-but-technically-independent political groups, FOX News and Republican Hate Radio. Saying as Wills does that the Republicans are "trying to keep the fringe aboard by humoring them so far as they can" is just looking the other way at what's happening. Wills makes it sound as though the Reps look at the Tea Partiers and the Birthers as embarrassing country cousins. In fact, they are the activist based of the Christian Republican White People's Party.

On a couple of other points, do the Tea Partiers' antics make "the John Birchers look moderate"? No, they don't. The Birchers are still around, they still have a significant influence within the Republican Party in mainstreaming far-right ideas into the "respectable" precincts of the Party. Ron Paul is a Bircher favorite, and one of the leading figures in that transmission-belt role. And the Birchers' conspiracy theories and political ravings are as crackpot as ever. In the context, Wills was presumably trying to emphasize how kooky some of the Tea Partiers are. But there's no point in adding more legitimacy to the John Birch Society, either.

And are the Republicans "afraid of losing anybody" and therefore reluctantly tolerate the Tea Partiers? Not that I can see. They seem intent on driving away as many African-American and Latino voters as they can. But given the past effectiveness of such tactics - an effectiveness which Wills disappears by framing this as all somehow brand new - and the broken-down state of our news media, whose dysfunctions the Republicans exploit very adroitly, it's more likely that they think they will attract enough scared white voters to offset the blacks and Latinos they drive away.

Tags: john birch society, radical right