The Galt and the Lamers 3
Steven M. thinks that the lamers have won.
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January 15, 2013 at 7:42 pm
I think there is plenty of room in the reptile brains of far right America for Ayn Rand and Alex Jones. Ted Nugent, for example, is the picture of the very poor man’s Galt. But he’s also been on Jones agreeing with the host that the US government has a secret list designating him as a terrorist, and that an armed revolution is coming. In fact, he danced around that on some obscure radio show today. You dig a little, theyre John Birchers, too, people who still go haywire over fluoride. The human mind has a great capacity for illogic and the weaving together of separate ideologies and delusions into something that makes perfect sense to the owner.
January 15, 2013 at 7:57 pm
I used to have more books on extremism in America than at present. Alex Jones has a lot in common with old familiar names like Willis Carto of the Liberty Lobby. Carto was a bigot and an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier who believed all kinds of toxic things, and still does. Now, if you dig hard enough with the people who think Gene Rosen is evidence of a government planned Newtown massacre, you also find the strong taint of anti-Semitism. Throughout US history, the dark side of the American psyche manifests itself in individuals like this. Jones is the new flavor and uses the Internet well. Glenn Beck was the ‘it’ crazy before he was booted from Fox, now he’s back to being marginal. Jones is also functionally equivalent to Lyndon LaRouche who used to continually run for president and is now very old. There’s something in the genes of old America that is ideal for breeding the poisoned mind. And the white mainstream likes to ignore it until it can’t, which is kinda like now. Often it still can’t bring itself to bluntly recognize what poison it is and that there’s something nurturing in the national background that always supports it.
January 15, 2013 at 10:24 pm
The minds of fools can easily embrace mutually-exclusive ideas, as in “television worth watching,” to pick one example. But I went for the glib. After all, this is a blog.
All seriousness aside, when I was in college, I did a paper on the radical right for one of my soc classes. (In the course of my research, I visited Bob Jones U., an easy visit since my grandmother lived in northwest South Carolina–BJU [heh] was one very spooky place.)
Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter had it figured out back then. It’s the same group of kooks. You can argue over details of their analysis, as this paper does, but the fundamentals haven’t changed: anxiety causes fear, fear morphs into hate, and hate breeds crazy. Back then, though, the kooks had not yet commandeered a political party.
Add in a dollop of frustrated racists seeing their world dissolve around them and voila! today’s Republican Party!