Allow me to introduce myself, I'm one of the three editors of the Mojowire. Just call me Hebisner, or Provider Biz in your nightly prayers to have liberals and socialist cast into the fiery pit...
Mr. Coates offers us an important idea to keep in mind as we fight the daily battle for truth and justice:
I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like "it's worth saying" and "it strikes me that..." or "respectfully..."When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it's worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them--respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with.
I will cop to the same fault as Mr. Coates admits to here. I'm a policy nerd first and foremost, and politics watcher and combatant second. I usually want to engage on the policy level first, and then fight the framing and political battle. But he's right. Its worth remembering who we are dealing with. And what we are looking at right now, with Mojo's previous post about christianist nuttery as prime example, are the 21st century Amerian Facists. People so committed and captured by their ideology that nothing, absolutely nothing will convince them they are in any way wrong or that there is a single moral or ethical boundry they cannot or should not cross to bring that ideology to fruition.
And spare me the usual claptrap about liberal extremists being just as bad. We are all adults here. We know there is no equivalent element of the left that has the political, economic, and social power to match the Christian Dominionist right. It simply does not exist. MSNBC is not the equivalent of Fox News in terms of the its active support of a political ideology or its contempt for its viewers, to point out an obvious example of this fallacy. I refuse to cooperate in perpetuating this absurd lie.
The Tea Party is not some Jeffersonian awakening. It is a race and class based reaction to the economic chaos and the election of a black President, supported by the conservative republican refusal to ever accept the legitimacy of a democratically elected President they don't like. A refusal not on the margins as is typical, but an absolute bedrock principle of the movement.
A key way to understand todays christianist conservative right is to look for what they project onto their opponents. In this case, the effort to redefine Facism as a political ideology of the left. Yes, an ideology founded on hypernationalism and hatred of socialism is embraced by liberals. Sorry, only pathetic losers who buy gold because Glenn Beck told them to are actually that stupid. The truth is that the tea party is a facist movement. There, I said it. They*are*facists. And racists. Deal with it scrubs.
That isn't to say they don't have a perfect right to believe what they believe. American facists are a staple of the American political system. I just don't like them or am willing to support them. And no, they are not Nazi's. At least not most of them. But lets face it, the GOP is being overrun by its most facist and theologically extreme elements. Goaded by a talk radio industry and a cable network who have built a business model out of the them.
And herein lies the problem. The Nazi' started out as one gang of racist thugs out of a large number of German poltiical factions in post WWI Germany. Their extreme racism and violent nature was well known to the industrialists, the wealthy, and middle class who supported them or did not oppose them. They thought they would be immune, Hitler would get the economy going, and he would get rid of those damn Communists who wanted to get rid of capitalism and institute a workers paradise. Socialists who wanted to regulate the free market and opposed nationalism and wars like the one Germany had lost and Hitler and many others had blame the Socialists and Jews for. Nothing extreme would happen, just a restoration of order and prosperity. Then they could get rid of the Nazis and bring in some technoratic centrists to run things. No problemo.
And yeah, I am going here. A political movement organized around racism, hypernationalism, and militarism is enough for me to call them facists. An ideology willing to torture their real or imagined enemies with ghastly practices we hung people at Nuremberg for. So no matter what Barack Obama's failings are, and there are plenty, I'll live with them. I will not treat facists of their ilk as just another political ideology in the great Amerian tradition of political conflict and diversity. Facism as they practice it is an ideology that is antithetical to American values as expressed in the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and our history of progress, however slow and spotty, away from slavery, institutional racism, and injustice.
So lets not kid ourselves. As Ta-Nehisi suggests, we need to be clear about the MotherFuckers we are dealing with.
