Is the Right-Wing a Cancer on Our Country? (revised, expanded, and linked)

Over the last week, I've had a lot of contact with the right-wingers at proteinwisdom.com (which now seems to have gone out of business). It's hard to describe their viewpoint. They're not evangelicals because there's no mention of religion at all. They're not necessarily neo-cons, and they make a special point of disavowing Limbaugh and Coulter. They're supportive of President Bush but don't talk about Bush anymore than Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney. Maybe Bush is taboo. Maybe the Bush brand has gone out of style.

Instead, the main motif of proteinwisdom is making fun of the left and the blog just bristles with little satires, inside jokes, put downs and demeaning little nicknames for people like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald. Certainly, they think they're hilarious. Blogger Dan Collins emphasized the hiliariousness of it all in a reply to me last night.

But, it's basically fluff. So, the fluff right it is.

However, one of their bloggers, Darlene Click, did get upset with me for referring to the right-wing as a "cancer" on American society. To be fair, I'll be glad to concede that I'm not worried about the fluff right here. They're not active enough and don't care much about anything beyond their own self-esteem to be much of a danger to anybody.

Why then, is the right-wing a cancer on American society?

1. Several prominent right-wing authors have been experimenting with ideas for eliminating democracy as we know it in the United States. These include Harvey Mansfield's justification of one-man rule, Thomas Sowell's yearning for a military coup, Newt Gingrich's proposal to weaken the protections in the first amendment, and another Newt idea to establish military tribunals for domestic war dissenters.

Figures like Robert Bork (for example in Slouching Toward Gomorrah) have been complaining for decades about federal guarantees for First Amendment and due process rights. Others have been critical of the evolution of popular culture, the ethic of tolerance (especially Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind), and the further democratization involved in the feminist and gay rights movements. The right is also suspicious of political dissent and there was a lot of talk among conservatives of treason among Iraq war opponents and mounting military tribunals to try and hang senators like Carl Levin of Michigan.

Much as they admire the flag and the military, the right-wing has been dissatisfied with the broad democratizing trends of American society for a long time. Now prominent right-wing spokespeople are talking about taking away fundamental rights and overthrowing democratic institutions. That makes them a threat to American society.

But what kind of threat? Given that the American right is largely a native growth, the right-wing can't be considered an external threat in the manner of al-Qaeda. Likewise, the right isn't exactly contemplating treason (although launching a military coup obviously would be treasonous). Instead, the publications speculating about the overthrow of American democracy suggest that the right is an internal growth that is beginning to pose a threat to the health and the life of whole system.

Cancer is a good word for that kind of growth.

2. The right-wing is pushing for more wars in both the short and the long term. Specifically, the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute are pushing the Bush administration to go to war with Iran before their term end. A war with Iran would be a war about nothing. Of course, the right has blown up Iran's nuclear program, the $200 mill they give Hezbollah (we give the Israelis $6 billion), and their accusations of Iranian aid to the Shiite militias in Iraq into the second coming of the Nazi blitzkrieg across Europe. If fact, the Iranians are a military non-entity and would still be a military non-entity if they had the bomb. Iran spends $6 billion compared to our $573 billion on defense. The right's primary idea in invading Iraq was to provide a secure base for intimidating or invading Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. But with the Iraq mission blowing up in our faces, there's no a longer a reason to finger Iran as the next in the long line of Hitlers we have to fight.

Because the right would like the U. S. to be a militarized society in general, there was relief in some conservative quarters (like Andrew Sullivan in his warmongering days) that the 9-11 attacks shook us out of our frivolous lives. The right's warmongering is closely related to its rejection of democracy. The goal of the right as expressed by the Project for the New American Century was for the U. S. to dominate every corner of the world and be willing to go to war with every competitor for regional influence like China, Iran, or Russia. The key is domination. The neo-cons wanted to establish global relations of domination that mirrored the domestic domination of the right projected by Karl Rove and Grover Norquist. What happened is that warmongering made global terrorism stronger while weakening the American military and dividing American society. Much like the demand to dominate American society, the warmongering demand to dominate the rest of the world turned out to be a kind of cancer on us.
3. The final cancerous dimension of the right they oppose the contemporary meaning of "the creed" in Thomas Jefferson's declaration that "all men are created equal." The currently fashionable bigotries are prejudices against Muslims and immigrants. Ann Coulter sums up right-wing religious bigotry succinctly when she demands that the U. S. invade Muslim countries and either kill Muslims or convert them to Christianity. She also captures conservative anger over immigration when she characterizes the United States as a "roach motel" for Mexican immigrants. Nice girl, that Ann. The conservative movement is also the home for white racist sentiment, homophobia, and hostility to women's rights. The worst thing about conservatives on these issues is that they keep finding compelling new ways to package and promote their bigotries. The most prominent packaging effort was William Bennett's repackaging of hostility to African-Americans as "color-blindness." Bennett was so successful that "color-blind racism" has become the dominant form of racism in the U. S. But the same kind of creative bigotry can be seen in the campaigns against gay rights and abortion. In many ways, the right-wing has turned the defense of traditional racial, gender, and sexual-orientation hierarchies into a on-going an on-going crusade against contemporary America.

As the Bush years wind down, the right-wing is beginning to coalesce against American democracy in all its forms. I'm not quite sure that they are an immediate (clear and present) danger to the American way of life and I believe that the failure of the Iraq War has arrested the progress of the right on several fronts. But it's hard for me to see the right as anything but a cancer on American society.