Thanks to Salon's War Room blog, I find myself reading this exercise in corroboration of Richard Hofstadter's thesis in "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The explanatory power of the essay is undiminished in The Tea Party Era. It might be fun, for purposes of comparing and contrasting, to set excerpts from Mr Dan Riehl's post alongside excerpts from Hofstadter's piece.
Here is Riehl, on President Obama:
This neophyte, this joke we have in the White House has absolutely no idea of the force and the rage he is about to unleash on him and his entire political party. If there are not enough responsible adults left within his party to rein in this accidental, affirmative action jerk, this self-styled, extremely flawed little man, then his party is worthless to America. It deserves to be marginalized electorally and, ultimately, utterly destroyed, before being relegated to the dung heap of history with the rest of the marxist, socialist clowns Americans have dispatched before.
Hofstadter:
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.
Riehl, on the high stakes:
Only a fool with no clear appreciation of, or for, America past and present, would dare undertake what this pustule in the White House is attempting to do. It is contingent upon the Republican Party to undertake every step, every maneuver it can to bring this government to a halt.
Hofstadter:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms--he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated--if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.
I hate all formulations beginning "Isn't it ironic. . ."--but am having a hard time finding a substitute lead-in to the name of Riehl's blog, which is Riehl World View. The quality or state of being unhinged is not one that fits easily with my conception of a conservative temperament, but, then, as a fit for the modern Republican party, "unhinged" passed "conservative" many years ago. For inhabitants of the r-e-a-l world, dissonance is amplified by the way in which messianic self-assurance cavorts with evident ignorance of the meaning of (for example) "contingent."
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