In America, crazy is a pre-existing condition

[Vympel]

A short treatment of right-wing extremist paranoid bullshit in America

In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition
Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of Right-Wing Rage

By Rick Perlstein
Sunday, August 16, 2009

In Pennsylvania last week, a citizen, burly, crew-cut and trembling with rage, went nose to nose with his baffled senator: "One day God's going to stand before you, and he's going to judge you and the rest of your damned cronies up on the Hill. And then you will get your just deserts." He was accusing Arlen Specter of being too kind to President Obama's proposals to make it easier for people to get health insurance.

In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that "under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever." He pressed his case further on Fox News.

In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots."

It was interesting to hear a BBC reporter on the radio trying to make sense of it all. He quoted a spokesman for the conservative Americans for Tax Reform: "Either this is a genuine grass-roots response, or there's some secret evil conspirator living in a mountain somewhere orchestrating all this that I've never met." The spokesman was arguing, of course, that it was spontaneous, yet he also proudly owned up to how his group has helped the orchestration, through sample letters to the editor and "a little bit of an ability to put one-pagers together."

The BBC also quoted liberal Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's explanation: "They want to get a little clip on YouTube of an effort to disrupt a town meeting and to send the congressman running for his car. This is an organized effort . . . you can trace it back to the health insurance industry."

So the 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.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

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. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."

The various elements -- the liberal earnestly confused when rational dialogue won't hold sway; the anti-liberal rage at a world self-evidently out of joint; and, most of all, their mutual incomprehension -- sound as fresh as yesterday's news. (Internment camps for conservatives? That's the latest theory of tea party favorite Michael Savage.)

The orchestration of incivility happens, too, and it is evil. Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror -- powerful elites -- find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

That provides an opening for vultures such as Richard Nixon, who, the Watergate investigation discovered, had his aides make sure that seed blossomed for his own purposes. "To the Editor . . . Who in the hell elected these people to stand up and read off their insults to the President of the United States?" read one proposed "grass-roots" letter manufactured by the White House. "When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?" went another.

Liberals are right to be vigilant about manufactured outrage, and particularly about how the mainstream media can too easily become that outrage's entry into the political debate. For the tactic represented by those fake Nixon letters was a long-term success. Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers, getting inside the heads of editors and reporters, haunting them with the thought that maybe they are out-of-touch cosmopolitans and that their duty as tribunes of the people's voices means they should treat Obama's creation of "death panels" as just another justiciable political claim. If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist" -- out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills -- the one hysterics turned into the "death panel" canard -- is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of "complaints over the provision."

Good thing our leaders weren't so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill -- because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

I didn't know about some of these bizarre conspiracy theories - I especially liked the one about JFK.

[Themightytom]

I think the article makes a really good point about the role of the media in all of this. I've seen Kostric at fairs and stuff. I was also at the Portsmouth town hall and it didn't seem especially chaotic to me it was downright tame compared to some of the election events I attended last year. The protestors all had their own areas behind the line and were self organized from supporters on one end to opponents on the other, and in the middle were all the people who were so crazy you didn't know WHAT the hell their position was. GUESS where Kostric was?

He doesn't care about healthcare specifically, he just figured out NH is small enough he could potentially import enough right wing voters to enact minimum taxes, and minimum government. Anyone who LIVES here knows everything that is Suck about NH is because we DON'T have a state government, so his strategy is to talk people into it and movve them in before they realize how awful his ideas are. I don't think he's "crazy" his bringing the gun was probably a delibrate publicity stunt combined with the sign. He planned it, the media ate it up, and then he BLEW it because he is not a public speaker. Look at his presentation on harball. Ratty stretched out T shirt, wierd little Hitler stubble... I dress my clients better than THAT.

I really don't know firsthand what the other townhalls were like, but I think Obama made a good point that the media is covering the Debacles, while they are plenty of civil constructive meetings taking place.

On the other hand its also possible portsmouth was staged to illustrate that reasonable discussion could be had, afterall, it is a sympathetic town, and the time and location weren't announced until sunday evening. hence all of the protestors on the OUTSIDE and the supporters on the INSIDE.

[Glocksman]

Perlstein's books on Nixon and Goldwater are recommended reading.

As for the conspiracy theories he mentions, they indeed exist and I know this because I believed them when I was younger.

For better or for worse, one of the very first 'political' books I read at the impressionable age of 11 was 'None Dare Call It Conspiracy'.
In retrospect, I can laugh about it but back in 1978 I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

[Buritot]

As for the conspiracy theories he mentions, they indeed exist and I know this because I believed them when I was younger.

You nailed it. For conspiracy theories to function one has to believe in them. Neither belief nor faith can be reasoned with.

[Glocksman]

As for the conspiracy theories he mentions, they indeed exist and I know this because I believed them when I was younger.

You nailed it. For conspiracy theories to function one has to believe in them. Neither belief nor faith can be reasoned with.

Tell me about it.

Shit, there are plenty of posters on my local paper's site who assert that either Sarah Palin was correct when she described end of life counseling as 'death panels' because one of the Senate panels dropped the living will provision, or that she was 'shrewd' in getting a provision she objected to dropped due to her characterization of the language.

I replied that trying to reason with such people is fruitless because serious debate is impossible with someone who insists that the answer to 2+2 is 'chartreuse'.

There are some conservatives who've posted serious questions and reservations about the bills meandering through Congress and I look forward to reading their posts, but they are seriously outnumbered by the death panel whackjobs.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Try telling them we already have death panels. They're called insurance companies.

[[R_H]]

Try telling them we already have death panels. They're called insurance companies.

I don't think they'd have a problem with that when it's some dirty government bureaucrat killing grandma, and not some heroic freemarket insurance company employee.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Try telling them we already have death panels. They're called insurance companies.

I don't think they'd have a problem with that when it's some dirty government bureaucrat killing grandma, and not some heroic freemarket insurance company employee.

Quite honestly, I'd rather it be a government bureaucrat that answers to medical science than someone trying to trade a life for a few dollars.

[Darksider]

Quite honestly, I'd rather it be a government bureaucrat that answers to medical science than someone trying to trade a life for a few dollars.

Yes, but you're sane, (relatively speaking) These guys live in Ayn Rand cukoo land where anything is justifiable when it's done in the name of the almighty free market. What if government interfered in the economy and then all the truely gifted captains of industry decided to stop being productive because there is no incentive besides greed and personal desire?


I swear to god, If I ever find a time machine, the first thing I'm going to do is go back and shove that selfish bitch down a flight of stairs before she can write that piece of trash.

[Darth Wong]

Try telling them we already have death panels. They're called insurance companies.

I don't think they'd have a problem with that when it's some dirty government bureaucrat killing grandma, and not some heroic freemarket insurance company employee.

To prevent the possibility of a government employee failing to provide medical care for grandma, we must reject any kind of government-run health care system, so that it is impossible for a government employee to provide care for grandma! Wait ...

[The Yosemite Bear]

yes, the bite your own hand sort of "logic", of course to some the right to bear arms now includes bringing assult weapons to political events known for hot tempers...

[[R_H]]

I don't think they'd have a problem with that when it's some dirty government bureaucrat killing grandma, and not some heroic freemarket insurance company employee.

Oops. Made a mistake, it should be: "I don't think they'd have a problem with that when it's some heroic freemarket insurance company employee killing grandma, and not some dirty government bureaucrat."