Sunday, March 30, 2003
A BRIT NAILS THE USA'S #1 PROBLEM
Will Hutton of The Observer (UK) explains the American right wing to the Brits, though IMHO he understates the severity of our political dilemma. IMHO, the right wing has been poisoning the American body politic for the past 30 years--Hutton's timeline is pretty accurate--and even if we started tomorrow, it will take decades to repair the damage they've wrought.
To put it bluntly, the American right wing is a homegrown, red-white-and-blue version of totalitarianism. Its ruthlessness, its black-and-white worldview that ignores the greys, its inflation of its own opinions into "The Truth," its sneering disdain for others' opinions and points of view, its definition of "bipartisanship" as "our way or the highway," its appropriation and extension of Goebbelsian propaganda techniques -- all of these the American right wing has in common with other forms of totalitarianism.
In their minds they are always right, so that means that anyone who disagrees with them must be wrong.
Since at least the early 80s, I've been warning that the greatest threat to American freedoms comes from the totalitarian right wing. And day after day, the right goes out of its way to prove that my warnings were prescient. Damn, I hate being correct!
Welcome to The Virtual One-Party State...
Will Hutton of The Observer (UK) explains the American right wing to the Brits, though IMHO he understates the severity of our political dilemma. IMHO, the right wing has been poisoning the American body politic for the past 30 years--Hutton's timeline is pretty accurate--and even if we started tomorrow, it will take decades to repair the damage they've wrought.
To put it bluntly, the American right wing is a homegrown, red-white-and-blue version of totalitarianism. Its ruthlessness, its black-and-white worldview that ignores the greys, its inflation of its own opinions into "The Truth," its sneering disdain for others' opinions and points of view, its definition of "bipartisanship" as "our way or the highway," its appropriation and extension of Goebbelsian propaganda techniques -- all of these the American right wing has in common with other forms of totalitarianism.
In their minds they are always right, so that means that anyone who disagrees with them must be wrong.
Since at least the early 80s, I've been warning that the greatest threat to American freedoms comes from the totalitarian right wing. And day after day, the right goes out of its way to prove that my warnings were prescient. Damn, I hate being correct!
Welcome to The Virtual One-Party State...
