But there's no disagreement among us that the modern conservative movement of Newt and Grover and Karl and Rush has proven to be a dangerous cultural and political cancer on the body politic.
This is absolutely true and I devote a lot of my own blogging to attacking the right and the many elements in the mass media and Democratic party who kowtow to the right.
But this is also a very disturbing truth from a red state perspective.
Lots of my students in Eastern Kentucky are committed right-wingers. I can think of four or five in one class alone. Two of my sisters in North Carolina would count as right-wing true believers. So would one of my aunts in South Carolina. Wherever Aunt Betty lives, she's probably a right-winger as well. Hard to tell about Uncle Jack in Texas. Maybe him too.
It's hard to think of my relatives and many of my better students as a "cultural and political cancer." Glenn Greenwald's even tougher. His post today on Norman Podhoretz is entitled "Face of a Psychopath" because Podhoretz would so blithely subject Iran to a bombing campaign. In a way, I agree with Greenwald. Calmly contemplating the murder of thousands of people certainly does sound psychopathic. But, I'm sure that my sisters and aunts would put a lot of enthusiasm into their own advocacy of bombing Iran. The same with my students.
Does that make them psychopathic?
I'm not sure that Greenwald who writes out of New York or Digby who bunkers in Santa Monica have this kind of problem. But the fact that my relatives and students are all either "normal" or normally screwed-up people actually makes the situation worse. The right-wing is not just Newt, Grover Norquist, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove. It's at least 20% of the populatio. It's mostly in the Southern and rural red-state areas and it's mostly pretty average or even fairly admirable people. This is what makes the American right so dangerous to the American democracy and to global stability. It's become "normal" in large parts of the country and might even be the majority in states like South Carolina.
The conservative movement is a cancer on American society. What's worse is that it's become a well-established cancer or a cancer of right-wing normality.
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6 comments:
Comment NAZI!
You only delete the posts that disagree with you!
I delete posts from Cleo. I've only forgotten to delete one post from him over the last several weeks. I thought the last post I deleted was from Cleo. If you're not Cleo, I apologize.
communism and facism are very similar in practice. Censorship especially.
Ric, scrubbing distracting comments from a blog because of their excessive length and lack of materiality is part of responsible blog management. I do it all the time in my pages and encourage it in sites I like to visit. It's much preferable to switching on, "comment moderation" which is like 'prior restraint' which suppresses spontaneity in discussions.
True. Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way.
Since Cleo already has his oppositional blog, everytime you take an opportunity to squelch an irrelevant comment from him/her, you could paste in a boiler plate para with a hot link to his site. That strikes me as so amusing, I may use that on my site.
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