Fringe Festival
There's been lots of discussion around here about the loony Left - the "Free Mumia" folks with the paper mache heads who show up to hijack any vaguely progressive public demonstration and wind up making the vast majority of reasonable, concerned citizens look ridiculous for being seen in the same place as them. Yeah, that sucks. It's why I'm not often seen at public demonstrations, despite often agreeing with the main ideas behind them. It's a lot easier - and probably no less effective, depressingly enough - to sit home alone pounding on the keyboard. At least this way, no one else gets the credit or blame for my rantings.
But the fact is, the loony Left is a tiny sliver of public opinion in America. Some are annoying, some are right about stuff but you hate to admit it because they're so obnoxious, some are as bad as fundamentalists in their moral certitude, and some are using politics as therapy to work out issues from childhood. Such is humankind in all places at all times. What's amazing is that this fringe group is taken to represent the views of a much broader segment of the population, when by every conceivable measure, they are not just an extreme fringe element, but a relatively harmless fringe element. Even the scary Stalinists of ANSWER probably spend more of their time excommunicating each other for tainting the pure spirit of Marx with hateful Troskyite doctrines than planning the violent overthrow of even the local school board. We haven’t had a Revolutionary (as in armed) Left in this country since the Weathermen of the late 60s, and even they barely made a dent.
What we do have is an increasingly active, militant Right Wing movement in this country. I’m not talking about Republicans here. These folks make W look like Teddy Kennedy by comparison, and they mean very grim business. For a depressing daily read on what these goons are up to and how deep they have their hooks into our society, read the brilliant work of Dave Neiwert at Orcinus. While the Hard Left’s idea of a triumph is to hijack a faculty meeting and get Toni Morrison added to the canon of Great Western Literature, these folks are actively plotting the armed overthrow of the US government and the establishment of a state along the lines described in Mein Kampf. Numerically, they probably only slightly outnumber the Young Spartacus League, but qualitatively, there’s much more to worry about.
The other problem is ideological. On the Left, there is a discontinuity between Liberalism and Communism, despite what conservatives would have you believe. Marxists have less use for “bourgeoise liberals” than they do for out-and-out capitalist stooges. Come the Revolution, we are all going up against the wall, and in the meantime, we are only useful idiots. This is actually a point of doctrine. Likewise, there is a long tradition of Anti-Communist liberalism in America, stretching back from Teddy Roosevelt to Dean Acheson, JFK, Hubert Humphrey, and on to the present day. This hard division accounts for much of the disunity often observed on the Left.
The Right has no such problem. While there are manifest differences in degree between your typical conservative Republican and the Holocaust-denying, Racially Pure militia guy, there is a continuity of ideology that makes it very easy for extreme ideas to creep out from the edges into the mainstream. We have seen this happen to an alarming degree in the past 10 years, to the point where near-mainstream figures are arguing that the US Constitution be scrapped so we can start again on a basis entirely consistent with “Christian” values. Again, I defer to the extremely detailed work of Mr. Neiwert and others on this topic.
Every liberal citizen who engages in dissent has to guard his or her left flank against being tarred as some kind of wacko hippie, but mainstream Conservatives rarely need to answer for the much more dangerous fringe movements that inform their ideology to an increasing degree. For this, you can credit the effectiveness of the Right Wing propaganda machine, which has worked tirelessly for the past 25 years to claim the mantle of patriotism for their own partisan purposes and brand any criticism as unpatriotic, anti-American, or somehow vaguely Communist. I urge concerned Conservatives to take care of your own house before throwing too many more stones our way.
9:15:06 AM 
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